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This week, Kevin McKernan, CSO and founder of Medicinal Genomics, joins the Cannabis Equipment News podcast to discuss unique ways to protect against strain theft, the state of cannabis science and how cultivators can grow their way out of yeast and mold failures.
In 2011, Kevin McKernan witnessed a few friends struggling with cancer and he starting digging in to the medicinal benefits of cannabis. He first made his mark in the nascent industry when he sequenced the cannabis genome and published it online.
At first, he was mocked. Nature magazine called it a "Cheech and Chong project." But about five years later, the scientific community started to support cannabis research. About 13 years later, the science community takes cannabis science much more seriously as a rich pipeline of people are trying to extract rare cannabinoids to treat unique disease conditions.
When McKernan founded Medicinal Genomics in 2011, he didn't have a business model, but he knew it was an important, unexplored topic. The first primary market to emerge was contamination profiling and finding a way to grow plants that were clean of yeast and mold. Total yeast and mold is the most common failure rate in cannabis testing and it has an enormous economic impact on the industry. But McKernan says there is a way for the industry to grow its way out of these common failures by breeding plants that have lower microbial loads, which in turn will lead to more tests passed and higher yields.
McKernan says the science is moving in the right direction, but we need to proceed with caution and be aware of the bias that exists in the scientific process.
Jump around:
- The challenges facing medical cannabis. (5:02)
- How cultivators can grow their way out of yeast and mold failures. (8:28)
- Defining genomics science. (9:23)
- Protection against strain theft. (13:22)
- The state of cannabis science. (21:18)
- How cultivators can easily improve yield, quality and safety. (29:07)
- How kill steps hide potential risks. (32:50)
- The dangers of endotoxins. (37:31)
- Why the industry fights against clean cannabis. (40:10)
- How to simplify cannabis lab testing. (46:30)
- The future of cannabis. (1:00:24)
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