Startup Blazes New Trail for Marijuana Research

Medicinal Genomics hopes to improve medical-marijuana treatments.

Image: Getty

Kevin McKernan envisioned a more powerful marijuana—for medical purposes, that is—and today his startup edged one step closer to that reality.

Medicinal Genomics announced this morning that it has successfully mapped the entire genetic sequence of the cannabis plant, in what the company calls a major step toward understanding and improving marijuana’s medical potential. The Massachusetts genetic research firm will make the information public later this fall.

The ganja genome, comprised of 131 billion components, can now be used to develop drugs that maximize the plant’s therapeutic benefits (particularly treatments for cancer, pain, and inflammatory diseases) and weed out compounds linked to psychoactive effects. For instance, the blueprint can be used to grow a plant that produces more of certain compounds, like cannabidiol, which have shown promise in shrinking tumors.

“One in three people are going to get cancer, and one in four are going to die with it or from it,” McKernan, the company’s founder, told Bloomberg. “So any compound, as preliminary as this may be, that’s nontoxic and shows hope there, we should be all over. The only way I knew how to do that was to sequence the genome.”

McKernan previously led a genome-sequencing team at California-based Life Technologies Corp. and, before that, worked on the Human Genome Project from 1996 to 2000. He left Life Technologies roughly one year ago to start his own company from his house in Massachusetts after several friends with cancer forwarded studies to him concerning medical marijuana.

The genome-mapping project cost about $200,000, and the company plans to extend its research to more than a dozen other species of cannabis. Medicinal Genomics will start rolling out the genome information to regulators, government agencies, and pharmaceutical companies in the coming months for continued research on the plant’s medical potential.

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