Dr. Markus Roggen

My name is Markus Roggen. I'm a chemist by training. I live in Vancouver, Canada, where I founded a research laboratory to look into the fundamental questions of cannabis chemistry. So here, at the Cannabis Science Conference, in Portland, I was invited to give a keynote lecture in the analytical track. I'm making the argument that we don't know enough, and we cannot individually figure it out.
We need to work together in a collaborative manner. Cannabis might be the big bogeyman or this mystical creature, but effectively, it's a plant that produces metabolites, some of them are psychoactive, so like coffee beans or nicotine. Where the problem comes in is that it is not one psychoactive substance or one compound that has the biological effect, but it's multiple that are produced in the plant.
The cannabis plant has, I think, at the latest, we have around 1,000 molecules that we are aware of that are in the plant, and we can properly point at 500 of them that might have some biological effects. So the problem of cannabis production comes in when everyone talks about consistency, they are thinking of THC and CBD. We have to think about 500, 1,000 molecules.
So that gives us problems in the sourcing of plants. Different genetics might produce different metabolites, then different growing conditions, indoor, outdoor, greenhouse, less light, more light, might also produce different molecules. Then in the extraction process, how do you handle those molecules, which do you extract, which do you leave behind, how do you treat it, do you do it at a low temperature to preserve the natural occurring ones, or do you heat it so that you get the psychoactive neutral cannabinoids, THC, for example.
So it's a multivariate problem that, as a chemist, it's loads of fun to think about. And I just try to track the molecules and then, in a second step, figure out how to produce or process them in different methods to provide different products that a pharmacist or a medical professional might need.
So the easiest process to think about that affects the outcome and the experience of the user is when we think about cannabis brownies, so a cannabis product that is eaten, that is not smoked or inhaled. Because the step of inhalation includes heat, and the heat will turn the naturally occurring THC acid to THC.
THC, psychoactive and intoxicating. THC acid might be psychoactive, but it's not intoxicating. When you eat it, there's no heat source. So, therefore, if you would eat cannabis flower or a baked good, there might be mostly THC acid present.
So you don't get high. So you need to have a separate heating step that turns THC acid into THC so that you feel the intoxicating effect and how this is done is some of the work I'm focusing on. So when I walk these expo floors at cannabis conferences, it's always a very interesting experience, because you have the large instrument manufacturers that sell into a host of different industries, agricultural, pharmaceutical industry.
And now, enter the cannabis space, and they have very sophisticated instruments, but they have very little understanding of what the cannabis industry actually needs right now. So that's where I hopefully can come in and help them out. So we worked with PerkinElmer, an instrument manufacturer of analytical tools, or Fritsch Milling, a German company for milling, to optimize their instruments and build methods that are particular to cannabis industry.
So the most exciting bit that I've been working on, that would be CO2 extraction research. I got into the industry in 2014, and CO2 just started up as a solvent for extraction. And everyone's like, "No, CO2 doesn't work.You can't extract terpenes with it. It's horrible." It took me two months and I could produce pure terpene extract with no THC in it, and they were nicely bottled.
Now, I'm taking this work further. CO2 as a solvent offers the ability to tune the solvent and then selectively enrich or extract certain compounds. So this has been a constant field of my research, and we are working on optimizing extractors so that you can have pure cannabinoid fractions in an extraction vessel or you can have very high yields.
So it's the quality and yield aspect that is often competing, but we are working on that aspect, throughputs, controls, graphs, statistics. It's beautiful. So we're working a lot on that aspect.