Join The Cannabis Boomer for an interesting discussion with Ruth Fisher, PhD an economist and cannabis technology researcher who published the Medical Cannabis Primer. https://medicalcannabisprimer.com/

#CannabisPatents #CannabisIndustry #CannabisResearch #CannabisTherapeutics #CannabisDelivery #CannabisInnovation #CannabisScience

On the Cannabis Boomer Podcast we welcome Dr. Ruth Fisher PhD for an interesting conversation about new patents in cannabis. And now, please welcome Alex Terrazas, PhD, The Cannabis Boomer.

Dr. Ruth Fisher, PhD economist, and the first second guest on the Cannabis Boomer Podcast. Thank you so much for joining me. I saw your recent study you published a quick blurb on LinkedIn and you have a deeper dive online, I saw that and I thought, gosh, I wish I had done that study. That's a great idea. So the study is about patents. And new patents in cannabis. So why don't you tell me a little bit about what you found.

There's been a lot of hype around the idea that it cannabis might be imminently rescheduled to schedule three. And they say, well, now finally there'll be research. And I come from kind of in my pre cannabis life, I spent a lot of time doing intellectual property and working with patents.

So for me, kind of the question of, well, gee, what's the patents in canvas look like with a natural question? So I went into the U-S-P-T-O database. US Patent and trademark office, and they have a repository there of all patents on file, and I went and I did some very basic keyword searches and I was trying to do a very narrow search.

A broader search would certainly have yielded more patents. But even with my narrow search, I found over 10,000 patents, which if you ask people, okay, how many patents do you think there are? Many people say, well, none because it's schedule one. And I say, well, there are actually some. They say, well, maybe a couple hundred.

So to think that there were over 10,000 just right off the bat is pretty stunning.

That's a very crude explanation, but so

Adding complexity to this is you can have the phyto cannabinoids, which are from the plant acting on your endo or natural system. We actually have ligands in our body compounds similar to say THC and CBD, that our body makes themselves. Because this endocannabinoid system wasn't created for cannabis, it was created by our bodies to use its own different substances to control different things in the body. And this is kind of the same system that cannabis acts on and, is very similar to the molecules or substances in our body. And that's why cannabis can do this. And so what the patents involve is essentially playing around either with phyto substances, cannabis produce substances, or other synthetics or stimulating or antagonizing mitigating, so unstimulating your body's own activity. And so these are kind of what the majority of patents are on.

So are some of the weirdest patents that you saw in your analysis.

And one of my favorite patents was a delivery mechanism, which was delivering cannabis into the body via lobster. So if you're eating lobster, they're somehow incorporating cannabis into that.

And most beverages are, are water based. So if you put cannabis into it, it's an oil base. You get kind of vinegar and, and oil type of problem. And your beverages would have the, the cannabis sitting as a glob in the water beverage, like, sugar based, like a soda or something like that, or a seltzer.

It, it wouldn't mix in. It would stick to the can. It tasted really gnarly. So this is why we didn't have beverages until very recently. And very recently, there were new technologies in emulsions, which is breaking them down into very small sizes nano. Emulsion technology, breaking them down into very, very small sizes.

And then once you break them into small pieces, you coat them with something which prevents them from rejoining together. So it's kind of like if you take oil and vinegar and you shake it up, you'll get a temporary dispersion of the oil in the vinegar, but then it'll settle. And so you would have that problem where you could shake it up and you could break it down and, and get it to mix very well, but eventually it would settle so it's sitting on the shelves and you get that re globalization.

And so these new technologies would break it into very small pieces, so you get dispersion and then it would coat it with a surfactant. So that they wouldn't re glob together, so you get stability in the dispersion. And so this enables, because so many things out there are water-based. The emulsions technologies and the solubility technologies enables beverages and IT tinctures and edibles.

Now, the other really big problem in cannabis has been the bioavailability. That when you consume it, it's, it's hard for your body to absorb it. Again, partly because of this lipophilic nature that your body, most things work on water-based stuff, and since cannabis is fat based, it has a hard time absorbing it into your body.

So, you know, you can, you can smoke, say a hundred milligrams. And only like maybe 30 of those are gonna actually get into your body because of a variety of different things. And especially the edibles. Oh my gosh. Because you, you eat them and they go into your stomach and, and your stomach acid can destroy a lot of it, and you need to process it and everything.

When you take edibles, a plain edible might have, say a 5% bioavailability. So if you're eating, you know. A, a gummy that's a hundred milligrams, which gummy shouldn't be a hundred milligrams, but if you are, maybe only five of those are actually getting into your system, which means it's very inefficient.

And these technologies address that. So they massively increase the bioavailability, which means now not only do you have to take a lot less, but you get more rapid onset of effect. If anyone's taken an edible and they know I had to wait an hour and a half or two hours to get the effects, now you can get it, you know, in 10 minutes or 15 minutes or whatever it is

They have a huge number of patents. They have like 150 patents and a large number of patents on cultivation on keeping pests out, so on pesticides and fungus and everything, minimizing the potential. A lot of them weren't necessarily specific to cannabis, so they could cover other crops, but also cannabis, but they're focusing on growing crops without the pests.

So you, I guess you need fewer pesticides but also increasing yields. And what that suggests to me is there's gonna be a lot of activity in growing crops, perhaps for say, pharmaceutical uses. Glaxo has a huge amount of activity in substance use disorders. And again, most of those aren't focused solely on cannabis, but substance use disorders more generally, say on cocaine or alcohol tobacco, whatnot.

You had this interesting dichotomy where if you look at pharmaceutical companies, they own a huge number of the patents, and if you look at the traditional pharmaceutical companies, they're looking mostly at synthetics, which is kind of their ballywick going through the FDA and the traditional healthcare FDA approval process, those are much more conducive to using synthetics. And so they had patents on synthetics, so they're, they're coming up with chemicals that are acting on the endocannabinoid system, but not necessarily cannabinoids. Whereas you have a bunch of new cannabis pharmaceutical companies that are looking more at the cannabinoids and using those so kind of more naturally based.

And looking at how those are acting on the system. So I thought that was really interesting. You're getting this clear separation where the old traditional pharma are going, the synthetic route and the new cannabis pharma are going the more natural route. Now they might. Not be doing necessarily whole plan.

They might be isolating, but then again, if you go back to BASF and they're doing all that growing, they're gonna be supplying someone. So maybe they're gonna be supplying some of these pharma cannabis companies. And I thought that was very interesting. Another very interesting areas, the tobacco companies, they have a huge amount in vaping technology.

A lot of those are dual use. You can do either cannabis or tobacco. But they're doing a lot in that area in vaping. And there's also these things called oral pouches, which I guess is like chew kind of stuff. And so they're looking at taking cannabis in a similar area of kind of historically tobacco. That's kind of my i, my conception of what they're gonna do with that. But vaping's gonna be a very big area and. Extraction was another big area. So if you're looking, there's a lot of process patents and most of the process patents are on extraction. You have flower and you have non flower products.

And while flower continues to be help hold a lot, a lot of market share, we're gonna continue to see more products that are not flower products and any of the not flower products, you need to extract the flower. So that extraction process is very predominant.

Can you help me figure this out? So that's kind of what brought me into cannabis. And before that, I knew nothing. So my purpose in coming to cannabis and you know, being in the industry was to understand its medical uses and how to help my brother address his pain. And so doing that, I just started reading a lot about everything but the medical literature mostly.

And we started kind of figuring things out and we understood that it's very much a learning by doing process. And my brother's an engineer, and as I said, I was in technology, he said, we need to create an app, a technology to help other people navigate this process better, you know, smoother. And so we knew that.

You needed to, you know, track and journal what you're using and how it's working to get to a better place. So we, we set out to create this app and I did all the research and created the algorithms to match products to people and creating the interface on, well, what information do you need to collect and how do you present it to people?

And we did all this. And then we realized it wouldn't work because in order to help people understand if what they're using is working or not, you need to actually know what they're using. And that means you need access to the COAs or certificates of analysis, which contain all the, the chemical profile.

Of the ingredients people are using and that wasn't available at the time. It's still not really easily available now. But in the meantime, my brother said, wow, you know, we've created so much information, we have it all put together in this amazing way.

Release a book. So we took all this information on how cannabis works and we, we released our book, the Medical Cannabis Primer. And what my purpose was in, in kind of designing the book was to say, okay, I'm a researcher and I've spent a large part of my career trying to understand and systems and how it all works.

And most people don't have that knowledge and skillset, and I've already spent a lot of time doing this. Surely other people are coming to the industry and they're trying to understand how things work. If they were able to do the research and had the time and resources, what would they do? And that's kind of what my book is supposed to be.

If you could have done the research yourself, here's the information you probably would have wanted. It doesn't create new information, it just. A masses or collects together information out there on what's known in the industry. How, how does cannabis work and what should people be looking for?

You can always find us on social media under at Cannabis Boomer. People who choose to use cannabis need to be aware of what they consume. This podcast is intended to make users better informed about cannabis and its effects. The information shared on this podcast is meant as current opinion in science and should not be considered medical advice.

#CannabisPatents #CannabisIndustry #CannabisResearch #CannabisTherapeutics #CannabisDelivery #CannabisInnovation #CannabisScience