Cannayeasts. That is what they call genetically modified yeast strains where genes from the cannabis plant have been added in order to enable them to make cannabinoids. Cannabinoids are the key chemical ingredients of the cannabis plant that possess therapeutic properties.
These “cannayeasts” make it possible to turn sugar into pure forms of cannabinoids.
But why use yeast and make the process more complicated?
Using cannayeast is reportedly a lot cheaper and does less environmental damage than farming or maintaining a cannabis farm.
Jay Keasling, of the University of California, Berkeley, and who led the research team, explained that adding cannabis genes to yeast can give us access to all the rare cannabinoids that might give better therapeutic benefits.
According to him, extracting pure cannabidiol (CBD) and tetrahydrocannabidol (THC) — the two most abundant cannabinoids in the cannabis plant — or making them from scratch, is more costly and more difficult.
Genetically modified yeasts, on the other hand, will produce pure cannabinoids without being as expensive. Keasling said that this can beat the economics of growing cannabis plants on farms, partly because there is a lot of manual labor involved in it.
He added that producing cannabinoids in yeast is less environmentally damaging compared to growing a large number of plants for the purpose of extracting a chemical that’s present only in small quantities.
Keasling and his team discovered cannayeast by accident. They found that they can create previously unknown cannabinoids by simply changing what they feed the yeasts.
What does this imply?
By making it possible to produce previously unknown cannabinoids, as well as to study them, cannayeasts might lead to new treatments for a wider range of medical conditions.
However, there are people who are skeptical.
Peter Reynolds, from the CLEAR Cannabis Law Reform group, said that there may be a market for cannayeasts, but he doesn’t understand why. It is not difficult to grow the cannabis plant, he explained.
Reynolds also expressed his doubts about the need for pure cannabinoids. According to him, the beneficial effects of cannabis rest on a combination of chemicals, which is called the entourage effect.
Keasling, meanwhile, responded that there is still no scientific evidence that this is the case. He said that even if the entourage effect exists, pharmaceutical companies want pure molecules in order to do pure science.
To commercialize the cannayeasts, Keasling and his team formed a company they named Demetrix. Their team is best known for creating a yeast that makes the anti-malaria drug called artemisinin.
There are also other companies that have shown interest in the potential of yeasts where cannabinoids are concerned. At least two of them, Canada-based Hyasynth and California-based Librede, have said that they are working on producing cannabinoids in yeast. However, they have yet to announce and publish results of their research.