Getting Into The Business Of Medical Marijuana: An Interview With IGC CEO Ram Mukunda

Engineering graduate Ram Mukunda spent more than 25 years working in Wall Street. He served in companies communications firms Intelsat SA I and Startec, before making an incursion into the mining industry through a company he co-founded.

India Globalization Capital, Inc. IGC was focused on the beneficiation of iron ore, which means it took low-grade iron ore and converted it to high-grade. However, a few years ago, iron ore prices plummeted from $180 per dry metric ton to roughly $40, in many cases selling below its cost of production. It was then Mukunda had to make a tough call.

“[We wanted] something that was more U.S.-centric, and we really liked the cannabis industry. We have now been working on it for over three years,” Mukunda told Benzinga.

Getting Into Cannabis

Benzinga: How does a telecom and mining-savvy mathematician and engineer decide to get in the marijuana business?

Mukunda: About three years ago (…) we started looking at the [cannabis] industry and trying to figure out how to position ourselves. So what we did is we came up with this approach: The industry is probably made up of three concentric circles.

• The first one are people who actually touch the plant; these are the growers and the processors TWMJF and AURORA CANNABIS IN COM NPV ACBFF].
• Then you have the second group, which are people who supply things to the guys who touch the plant, the LED makers and so on.
• Then you have the third circle, which really is more of the people who are directly or indirectly part of the industry, say for example, investors, social media sites, information providers, cannabis magazines and so on.

[We ended up] looking more deeply into the medical aspects for a couple of different reasons. One, we felt that there were a lot of untapped uses of the plant, and so we started looking to what we could do with extracts, what could we do with some of the oils and the actual cannabinoids themselves, the THC, CBD, or CBG, and of the other cannabinoids.

So we started looking to that, we created a team of doctors and patent attorneys, and we looked at areas where patents had not been filed or we looked at anecdotal evidence.

Benzinga: So, what did you come up with? What are you working on now?

Mukunda: We came up with several areas where we felt that cannabis could really make an impact. Some of these areas, anecdotally, were already known; for example, pain. We came up with a formulation for pain and we filed a patent for that. It's cream that can be applied to joints for different kinds of pain. Now, we are going to start doing clinical trials.

Our objective is to not do anecdotal stuff, but to actually do clinical trials and eventually do the double blind placebo trials so that we actually have products that have been proven to work.

We [also] have several formulations for cachexia, which is an eating disorder (…) A lot of people who have HIV, AIDS, or cancer, or going through cancer treatment, they get this. 

We are working on epilepsy, PTSD, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s.

Benzinga: What differentiates you from cannabis biotech companies like GW Pharmaceuticals PLC- ADR GWPH or Zynerba Pharmaceuticals Inc ZYNE?

Mukunda: Our approach really hasn’t been to look at just cannabis (…) we’re looking at is the combination therapy space [combining therapeutics with other existing medications to reduce their side effects and even increase their bioavailability and absorption].

For the past three years, we have been building the intellectual property around that space, and no one else is really doing this. We have been the first to enter that area.

The Next Steps

Benzinga: For the past three years, you’ve been focused on intellectual property. Do you have plans to create a product you will sell, or will you remain concentrated on creating IP?

Mukunda: We are now transitioning from having built that portfolio and the teams, moving towards products. The cream targeting pain, for example, that is one of the first ones we are going to look at. We are also looking at one that addresses seizures in veterinarian animals, and also cachexia or eating disorders, both in humans and in veterinarian.

Benzinga: You have a few products that are expected to start preclinical trials in 2017. Do you have estimated dates or timelines for getting these drugs into the clinic?

Mukunda: None of our products are in the clinic right now. We have done anecdotal testing on animals.

In getting these to clinical trials, we are looking at different countries where we can do this. We are looking at Israel, where we are talking to CROs. We are also looking at Canada, Colombia and Mexico. We are looking at these different countries to see where we can do some of this testing.

It's trickier to do it in the U.S. because of the federal regulations. But, even in the U.S., we are talking to people who are interested, and we're getting a lot of interest. It's very exciting.

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