Building Trust into the Cannabis Industry

Recent events surrounding a cannabis genomics company in Oregon have sparked outrage amongst the cannabis community. This particular organization offered sequencing services claiming it would serve as a mechanism for demonstrating prior art to combat future patents.

Instead, those services were used to stock a breeding program that would directly compete with the very same cultivators who purchased their services. This has broken the trust of many cultivators and breeders who are now wary of the intentions of genomics companies that handle the DNA of their IP. And understandably so.  

While we were disappointed by this behavior, we weren’t surprised, having seen similar scenarios play out in the human diagnostics space. We voiced our concerns to the industry more than two years ago after pointing out that the sequencing data the company had promised to make public had not, in fact, been made public, and what data that was published was so severely compromised it was useless.

We also sent a letter to the Open Cannabis Project (OCP) Board of Directors voicing our concerns over this lack of transparency and the Project’s former director, Beth Schlecter, was the first person to reach out and take the concerns seriously. Unfortunately, this was not enough to alter the trajectory of what would eventually transpire.

As a cannabis genetics company ourselves, albeit with a different bent, we had begun building an antidote to this sort of data harvesting nearly 10 years ago. We hope the following public statements will remind the cultivation and scientific communities where we stand on the issue:

1. We are proponents of blockchain technology and the ethos that technology helps to engender. It is a system designed to be trusted because it cannot be altered, falsified or its data stolen. We firmly believe that this technology is the remedy to the trustless platforms employed by the aforementioned company (and others sure to follow). Cryptocurrency is about replacing human trust with the immutability of mathematics. Blockchain’s distributed ledgers eliminate the problems we’ve just witnessed of third parties who violate the trust they were unworthy of in the first place.

1. We believe our actions tell you everything you need to know about who we are and how we do business.
   1. In 2011, we sequenced Chemdawg and made it public within 60 days.
   2. In 2017, we sequenced Mitragyna Speciosa (Kratom) and made it public within weeks.
   3. In 2018, we worked with some of the most respected and innovative firms in this industry, including PacBio and DASH cryptocurrency,  to sequence Jamaican Lion and make it public within 60 days.
   4. We have consistently published our work in open source journals. These studies span a spectrum from cannabis genomics, to microbial safety testing, to human genomics of the ECS.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0187926

https://f1000research.com/articles/4-1422/v2

https://f1000research.com/articles/5-2471/v1

https://osf.io/7d968/

1. We built blockchains into our Kannapedia.net, the most authoritative and complete cannabis strain database so far produced, so even if we disappear or are bought, our customers will still have the timestamp of their strain on an immutable ledger that can never be altered, not even by us.
2. We built youPCR, a point-of-grow, genetics testing platform for cannabis breeders, to enable cultivators to screen for genetic markers on site at their own grow.

All this being said, what can we learn from this incident and how does the cannabis industry move forward with confidence? Our solutions are threefold:

1.  Empower cultivators and breeders by providing them with tools like youPCR to perform their own genetic testing. This puts the customer firmly in the driver seat and the data is within their hands.

2.  Utilize decentralized blockchain technologies to ensure that all DNA sequences are encrypted and simultaneously remain public and tamper proof indefinitely. This comes in the form of modified variant call files (VCF) which house customer information along with valuable information about the SNPs that are present. These VCFs are encrypted using a deterministic hash that is unique to that sequence which is then uploaded to the DASH blockchain.

3. Do your homework. Research your options and recognize that what you’re creating is valuable. Work with people who treat your IP as something special that needs to be protected. Understand that legalization will change this industry in ways no one can really predict and that it’s not going to revert back to the way things were, ever. This nascent industry that was once underground is now at the epicenter of profound social, cultural and economic changes. Learn to embrace them in order to be able to participate in the wealth and good fortune this plant is going to bring about.

The moral of the story here is that there are bad actors in every endeavor who can taint the public’s perception of an entire industry. But that’s not the whole story. We firmly believe in the power of genomics and blockchain to change this industry for the better and along the way, to ensure the people whose lives are entwined with this industry, once again, have something to believe in.