 Alright, I think I'll get started and tell you guys a bit about my work with engineering streams of yeast to produce various cannaminoids. My name is Kevin, I'm from Montreal, this is my first DEF CON, and I'm enjoying it a lot. My background is primarily in biochemistry, but I am the CEO of Hyacinth and I do a lot of the fundraising stuff. And on the side, I also do some biohacking and DIY, bio sort of stuff, so I've been to hope a couple of times, so I'm somewhat familiar with hacking things, but I'm not very good at any hacking stuff, so hopefully today and tomorrow I'll learn something from you guys. A little closer to my, yes. So to get things started, I don't know if you guys were here for the rest of the day and saw the other talks, but maybe you got a bit of a primer about cannabis and how it grows and how to tell if it's sick or not or what the chemistry looks like. We had some fantastic talks earlier about that. I'm going to shift the focus away from maybe cannabis plant stuff and talk more about specifically the cannaminoids, which are the name for the active ingredients in cannabis. So THC is one cannaminoid, CBD is another cannaminoid, and there's about 100 others. The basic question to start things off is, where do they come from and also how much do they cost? Of course, the most intuitive thing is to grow plants and to get THC, and that's pretty good. As far as costs go for growing plants, you guys, people who have done their own growing would know their own estimates, but I think if you had pure THC, maybe like $10 a gram kind of thing, if you really want to get your costs down, but anyways, plants are just one way of getting THC, and as we saw earlier, you can also synthesize THC using chemistry, and that's kind of what you would see in the middle image there is a big chemical plant that's producing all this THC. I think that plant in particular is for some other pharmaceutical or antibiotic or something like that. But I'm here to talk about a third way of doing this stuff, which is to engineer strains of yeast to produce THC and other kinaminoids, which has its own set of advantages compared to chemistry and to compare to growing plants. So it's a bit of an introduction to what this is all about. We're talking about biosynthesis here, which means that there are chemical reactions happening inside the plant cells that will take sugar all the way to something called olivotolic acid, then to cannabidrolic acid, and eventually to THC or tetrahedral cannabinoleic acid and CBD, and these chemical reactions are driven by enzymes which are the molecular machinery of the cell, and I don't know what kind of backgrounds people have in biochemistry and stuff like that, but these enzymes are genes inside cannabinoids, that you can cut and paste and move around if you wanted to. And so our goal is to kind of take these genes from cannabis, like those segments of DNA that are responsible for producing THC, and put those into a strain of yeast. And then that yeast we can grow using just sugar and water and really big steel tanks that go up to hundreds of thousands of liters and have a really big industrial scale kind of system for producing pure THC, that's a lot more efficient than chemistry and growing plants. What this looks like from an overview standpoint is that when you're thinking about what a yeast is doing in its cells, it takes in sugar and it grows, that's what a yeast does, it produces CO2, or it produces ethanol if you want it to make a beer or something like that. And our job as a metabolic engineers and genetic engineers is to look at this pathway and add on things that are going to get us to making something like a livitolic acid and eventually to THC. So this involves a lot of changing around the genome of yeast and tweaking certain things and figuring out different ways to grow it so that it does optimize for production of THC. In the simplest way of thinking about this, we add three or four enzymes that convert from sugar to THC in the end and that's the easy way to think about the problem. And then if you want to make something like CBD, then you remove the THC producing enzyme and you add a CBD producing enzyme and then you're making CBD and CO2. This is one of the advantages of manipulating genetics that you can switch things on, switch things off, you control the stuff like a program. The challenge comes in as things get more complicated when you're talking about like 100 different cannabinoids and all these other metabolites that get made alongside of it where it's not as easy as adding just three or four genes to a yeast and then you get THC out, you're going to be playing around with maybe hundreds of different genes and for us we've gone through hundreds if not thousands of combinations of different genes to optimize and to improve always on our yields and to try and get to producing different cannabinoids. So that's kind of how we think about this stuff. And just to clarify one thing I guess, we saw a bit of this earlier too. We're not thinking about synthetic cannabinoids at all, we're just interested in the ones that the plants make. You could possibly engineer yeasts to produce some of these synthetic cannabinoids but there's not as much of like an interest in these things right now. So I don't usually use the word synthetic when I talk about what we do because people get sometimes confused about synthetic cannabinoids versus ones from plants and we're making the ones from plants but we're not growing plants in anyways. Yeah. All right so after we've made cannabinoids and the question is okay where do we go? And this comes to talking about why we're doing this whole thing as we would have seen earlier as well and probably you guys know like cannabinoids go into your brain, they react with your cannabinoid receptors and then you get the various effects like feeling high or having an appetite or whatever else and all kinds of different things or as Mark Lewis said this morning maybe you know tweaking your entire personality apparently is part of this system but it's a yeah super interesting system to manipulate and there's all these different cannabinoids that are going to affect it and that's ultimately you know what we're working towards and because cannabinoids do this that means that we can use them to treat various diseases whether that's for epilepsy or for mental health disorders like depression or anxiety even glioblastoma has like you know late stage brain cancers has seen a lot of interesting results from using THC along with other cancer treatments and then nausea, appetite loss during cancer therapy is another that one is what Marinal that exists on the market right now is prescribed for and there's also another product called Satevex that's cannabis extract that's so prescription drug so a lot of newer cannabinoids stuff kind of points in that direction so I guess out of these two out of these four pictures maybe the biggest ones are epilepsy which is fairly new and then nausea, appetite and stuff is kind of the classical you know thing that people try to use cannabinoids for and there's the famous story of Charlotte's Web and this whole thing where CBD is now like being used for treating epilepsy and there's a really interesting timeline where this stuff kind of came out in 2013 and then 2014 like the pharmaceutical company GW Pharmaceuticals started their first trials of CBD with epilepsy and now it's as of a few months ago on its way to the market and approved by the FDA and yeah so when it comes to thinking about like why we're doing this we're really interested in looking at different ways of producing THC and CBD and not just thinking exclusively about growing plants as like this has to be a BBL end-all solution because it does take a lot of energy and time to grow plants and if I think in terms of numbers it's like yeah three months to grow plants and if you really want to get high levels of THC then you have to grow indoors in a very controlled environment and how about those like lighting energy and stuff like that so it's really not that you know environmentally friendly or economical to grow THC in that method and then with chemistry you're working with petroleum based compounds you're having multiple different reactors and always interesting temperature controls and reagents has to go into that process and that also becomes quite complicated and can take you know weeks as well to do but with yeast it's more like you know you add sugar you add water you add the yeast you wait a week these grows up then you do an extraction and get your THC out or CBD or whatever one that you're interested in and that's the process that we're you know aiming for and there's a few different advantages to this but as far as you know the impact that this is going to have on the industry is that we're finally going to be able to have a reliable supply chain for CBD that's coming from a source that is industrially scalable and what I mean by that is now my thoughts are like a little bit all over the place but we'll bring it back I'll keep going and then I'll bring it back and then you guys can ask questions and then I'll everything will be okay so yeah it is quite hard to grow cannabis plants and I haven't tried growing them myself and I mean it maybe it is easy kind of easy to do it in your closet if with the right amount of investment but once you start scaling things into like agricultural level and you're starting to build out you know acres of greenhouses that get you know entirely contaminated with powdery mildew and then you lose like millions of dollars of crops at the same time instead of like you know a few leaves in your plant in your closet then you're getting into problems so there's a few cases in Canada where some of these big marijuana companies that were growing these huge amounts of product were using pesticides that they weren't allowed to use because there's only a few pesticides that were allowed to use because that's the way that Health Canada restricts things and for good good reason because you're you're lighting this product on fire you're inhaling it and if you're inhaling pesticides and that's different from when you're eating pesticides and so there's there's a really you know restrictive thing there and so there's a few companies that got caught using these pesticides and that was causing some health problems in Canada and I think this is still in the US I'm not sure where things are at as far as practice that use exactly but I'm glad that in Canada this was discovered and this was enforced and that might not necessarily be true for all the different US states and now with California's legalization coming up there's expected to be some kind of bottleneck in cannabis testing labs where there just aren't enough labs to test all the cannabis that's going to go on the to the market so Hyres was to know if your cannabis does or does not have these pesticides in it but it is all of these problems are associated with growing cannabis plants and not with yeast of course because when you grow yeast it's just in these very controlled environments and you're focusing just on extracting your THC and not having you don't add any pesticides or antibiotics or anything like that the other key advantages is in diversity of products so like was mentioned earlier we I see these things kind of like Lego blocks where you know there's going to be a hundred different canaminoids it can be a whole bunch of terpenes and they're all these different like molecular compositions that you could build and put together to create these optimal experiences for when you use a canaminoids or a cannabis product and to kind of dismiss the idea of like getting down to that finer-grain stuff and discovering what all these things do is like we have to know these things and it's super interesting to know you know which perfect combination will be the best treatment for epilepsy or which perfect combination will be the best treatment for like a Friday night you know night out or something like that and and this is also part of the reason why you know yeast is so interesting is because you can manipulate the genetics you can clone new things you can build new canaminoids or or very quickly you know scale up new kinds of products using this technology and then as I mentioned earlier the question of scale is the other one and this may be the biggest kind of clear thing that is becoming more and more defined as we go along with the development of the bigger and bigger grow-ups is if you think about the scale that is needed to treat something like epilepsy like there's 50 million people in the world who have epilepsy and now there's like between CBD and CBDV some new drugs being developed for treating epilepsy and if you if you add that up to like that you know how much the dosage is and what this is going to take then you're getting into the range of like you know 1500 tons of pure CBD or CBDV like the pure cannabinoid product and I think if you compare that against like a cannabis growth operation and maybe the total amount of cannabis in the world right now it's still maybe a hundred or a thousand times away from getting close to that those kinds of numbers and if you're willing to bet some money on like you know what's going to be the scalable best way to grow cannabis it's going to cost you maybe a hundred million dollars to get to 16 tons per year of product and if you pay more like 50 million dollars of investment then you might build a facility that grows yeast and you can do more like 750 tons per year and so you know this is the reason why this is so interesting because it has this established industrial scalable model of manufacturing and this is my last slide and then excited to go to questions in Canada I'm from Canada so you can ask me about the Canadian law system and what's going on there because I know quite a bit about that but it's actually funny just to share a bit of perspective where Canada has this like you know very well defined objective of like you know cannabis being illegal is a health risk because it exists as a black market and so on so forth and there's access to youth that they wouldn't really want to control and so they're motivated in this way to create legalization and to create a framework for access getting access to cannabis legally and so you know instead of us dealing with the DEA like the Drug Enforcement Agency or the FBI or whoever else that you know manages it where it's a kind of a narcotics control board that's managed by the police we deal with Health Canada where it's like a public health agency that is oriented towards improving the health of Canadians and they see this as like the priority so you're welcome to ask me more questions about that and maybe you can write into your own governments about you know this perspective because I think it's it's kind of one of these arguments for towards cannabis and some things on fire all right yes carbon footprints I guess we'll sit tight or we can we can get up and go outside or something like that what are we supposed to do is it's gonna be just gonna be like a minute longer okay we can talk while she's talking between alarms we'll do it very quickly I do yes hey we're back all right questions then yes I'm back so like I said earlier the basic concept is to look at the genes in cannabis and take take those and I can speak more specifically I guess the cannabis genome is sequenced it's online somewhere along with the genomes of various other organisms along with yeast of course and so you can look at the genomes and pull the segments of DNA out email those to a DNA census company and they'll make it for you and send it to you in the mail and so you know we've never actually touched any kind of plant material we just use the digital DNA information and then just have it ordered online for us and that's the probably the fastest and easiest way to do this kind of stuff and then there's like five or six different techniques including like CRISPR-Cas9 stuff that you can use to engineer yeast it really depends on you know what your approach is and what gene you're targeting so it's a lot of hard work and a lot of sweat and tears and blood and everything that goes into engineering the yeast but it'll take more time than it would take to you know grow a plant but to you know if you wanted to breed a plant that would have high amounts of THCV or something like that then you're probably better off using a yeast than an engineering that instead of trying to breed a plant to do that kind of thing yes yes no plant material let's see if I go to oh I'm not online they're mine all right we won't do a live demo but anyways you can go to idtdna.com or look up just DNA census companies and you can write in DNA sequences and they'll they'll make them for you and it'll cost like 10 cents per letter that you order and then they send you the actual DNA sequence which will look like a clear powder or like a liquid or whatever and then that's what you work with and that's you know the DNA is inside that liquid and that's all you're handling so there's no actual plant material being moved around or anything like that that's that's kind of how it goes so if you were if you were starting with synthesized DNA then you would need to have also like a plant material to add it into so you're not like growing from scratch of course and and this is where like what mark was saying earlier about how you need to have isolated versions of plant cells that can be grown into plants and then you can cultivate you know modified strains like all this technology that's involved that's part of what you would need to take synthesized DNA and make modified plants so you wouldn't be able to order a plant online by just typing the DNA sequence of the plant and then not yet one day maybe maybe like in maybe 10 years maybe like 100 years I don't know I don't know I think I saw any in the back first not specifically and that is one of the things that we'll be testing like as soon as we are make the stuff and are authorized to do all the testing and whatever else needs to happen for that but basically when we're when we're looking at and we're thinking about this we're talking about the chemical composition and what's going to work the best and so when if you took THC that's been isolated into 100% pure from the plant 100% pure from like chemical synthesis and maybe 100% pure from biosynthesis and compared to the side by side you should have exactly the same results no matter what and then the usually the finer detail of like how effective a cannabis thing is versus aesthetic thing is is when you're talking about these compositions of cannabis oils where yeah there's more stuff in cannabis oil and so you get different effects compared to just like a purified form of THC and that'll be something that we consider when we go into our own testing is like we're not just wanting to make purified THC because that's kind of been done and doesn't work that well compared to cannabis in many cases I saw this in yeah over there in the back yeah okay uh about 12 months kind of thing yeah 12 to 18 months and right behind you it's not for sale yet um and uh maybe maybe on our website eventually uh the highestandthbio.com you can go there and try it yeah sorry highestandthbio.com that's our website I have business cards and stickers and stuff you guys can come up to the front and grab some too uh who did I have next is it you next I think you've got your hand you still have your hand up so let's go with you uh theoretically yes and and practically probably yes as well um and and this has been done uh or explored a bit with the people who are trying to engineer yeast to make opioid stuff like they took it and tried to brew a beer with it and then the I think their analysis was like look it doesn't make opioids which is like you know it wouldn't uh because the conditions are different because there's not very much yeast in there um the so you might be able to bake a bread with it it might not have any tsc in it and that's just like the way it'll go and it might smell like flowers or something like that because that's uh all right thanks um in the back all right uh yes um and there's some terpenes that uh could possibly be good biosynthesis targets like along with the kinaminoids um but also some of these terpenes I think you can get from other sources like kind of cheaply and so uh or even like take a purified form of CBD that we make and mix that in with like a hemp oil and then you have your your full spectrum thing that way uh there's a few different ideas that are you know we've got in mind for when we get to that stage yeah so your main focus right now is CBD yeah uh it's a bunch of things in parallel kind of thing so CBD we've done maybe the most to work around but also uh like this kind of science does well when you try to do THC as well at the same time or THCV and so we've got like a whole bunch of tracks that are running through in like high throughput kind of thing yeah all right uh I see somebody way in the back um so when you're looking at like the yeast soup in like a liter of yeast soup you would get like one gram of product kind of thing um and uh that's like our that's our these next target we're not we're not there yet but like you know that's sort of what we're aiming for um and that's pretty good for a uh a process um yeah yeah insulin is is a yeah different yeah it it's hard to compare I guess because every every product is a bit different and it's in uh insulin is like a protein so you need less of it and also it's uh producing much lower amounts uh but I guess the comparison that I can draw is when people were trying to do biofuels using yeast where you know then they were getting like pretty a lot higher yields or they needed to get a lot higher yields in order to make it commercializable um and then you're talking about like you know tens or hundreds of grams of product per liter of yeast um or or even more than that maybe uh it's yeah um so that's our kind of our goal yes so solvent extraction uh basically and there's a bunch of other techniques like we could try supercritical co2 stuff as well and do the same thing as we is done with plants um and I'm going I don't know if I'm going over time but I guess Rex are you up next yeah okay all right Rex will tell me when he's ready to present okay cool so this will be maybe one more question after this while Rex gets set up um and uh and your question was extraction yeah various methods uh and there's there's ones that are established pretty well for yeast uh like doing like column separation or or solvent extraction stuff depends a bit on the product and depends if we're going for THC or if we're going for CBD and depends on like other things um and uh yeah yeah okay Rex yes all right cool I'm excited for Rex's talk too so stick around yeah