Exploiting Controlled Environments for the Development of Optimised Cannabis Sativa Phenotypes for Pharmaceutical Applications - CE-CannPharm

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The pharmaceutical industry is relatively mature and underpinned with a plethora of increasing sophisticated science, technology, and more recently, AI approaches. Despite this 90% of clinical drug development fails but global demographic evolution is driving increased numbers of degenerative and neurodegenerative/dysfunctional disease, and this has seen pharma broaden their focus to nature-based therapies and, here, embrace the long-known, and increasingly clinically underpinned, benefits of medicinal cannabis.A recent research briefing from the House of Commons Library report identified that the UK is the world's biggest producer and exporter of legal cannabis for medical and scientific purposes with Prohibition Partners projecting a UK value of £1Bn by 2026 and Statista estimating a global market already in excess of £13Bn in revenue.However, there is a problem with cannabis for the pharmaceutical industry in that the cannabinoid profile changes with location in the plant with the chemo-profiles of the flowers at the top, middle and bottom showing a variance of an order of +/-20% (or more), which is significantly beyond a typical pharmaceutical product tolerance of =+/-10%. This creates a major consistency and grading problem for C.Sativa when it is considered as a pharmaceutical medicine.Here, with our industry partners Glass Pharms Ltd, we aim to address this via several avenues. Via a screen of diverse C.Sativa germplasm we will establish plant architecture variation with the aim of exploring the potential of ultimately creating C.Sativa plants with an altered architecture: less "Christmas tree"- and more "menorah"-shaped, with inflorescence (flowers) more even presented to the incident light. This should impact positively on flower bioactive content composition and importantly variance redcution.We will also look to increase productivity and reduced variance by dwarfing C.Sativa through established methods and exploring the potential of total controlled environmental agriculture here by vertical farming. This absolute control on the environment will allow us to fully exploit the tuneable light intensity and wavelengths of the VF-embedded lights across crop development offering the opportunity to also "tune" the cannabis cannabinoid and terpenoid content, composition and variance. Allied to this we will elucidate the light/plant interactions at the gene and metabolite levels to identify the important gene cascades with a view to identifying gene targets/markers for future exploitation via traditional or modern (genetic modification/gene editing) breeding approaches.Here as part of a collaboration between JHI and Glass Pharms Ltd, both high TCH cannabis production licence holders, we will deliver the following: Greatly improved consistency in the distribution of the active pharmaceutical ingredients contained in Cannabis Sativa across different inflorescence (flowers) on the same plant.Better standardisation of cultivar phenotypes for CAE/VF systems with a target for dwarfed and uniform phenotypes.Defined conditions and process to manipulate/define cannabinoid content and composition. In a wider context the planned research underpins many of the UK policy targets in terms of high-value sector economic growth with associated permanent highly skilled jobs, improvement of healthcare for an evolving demographic and the diversification of the UK agricultural base. The proposed science here will underpin and help maintain the UK's lead as a medicinal cannabis producer and exported.