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Extracting cannabidiol without the need of cannabis

Do you know the process behind CBD production?

Cannabidiol, commonly known as CBD, is one of more than 80 organic compounds found in Cannabis sativa plants and it has significant medicinal interest due to its various therapeutic effects. CBD is associated with anti-inflammatory, analgesic, anxiolytic and anticonvulsant properties of great therapeutic interest, without having the psychoactive effects common to THC (tetrahydrocannabinol). For this reason, it has wide applicability, especially in the treatment of diseases that affect the nervous system, such as epilepsy and multiple sclerosis, which is estimated to have around 40,000 cases of people living with it in Brazil.

The Brazilian scenario

However, the current Brazilian scenario presents several restrictions in the legislation that hinder both the cultivation of the plant and the importation of CBD, even for medicinal use, which make it difficult to import or produce cannabidiol and inacessible to the majority of the population.
50,000,000 people worldwide are affected by epilepsy according to the World Health Organization(WHO)
In Brazil, epilepsy affects around 2% of the Brazilian population. Furthermore 25% of patients have a severe stage of epilepsy.

How can we make CBD more accessible and avoid bureaucracy?

This is precisely where our team comes in: this project is an alternative to meeting this demand for CBD, by introducing genetic modifications into the Saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast, so that this yeast is able to produce the CBD compound without the need to cultivate cannabis. In this way, it is possible to avoid the bureaucratic complications associated with plant cultivation, as well as the need for specialized labor and the costs involved in cultivation, and thus make the drug more accessible to the general public.

The Plan







Explore our wiki to find out how we take what we know about cannabis from the literature and engineer it into our project!