Beating The Nature's Way: Bio-Synthesized Cannabinoid Production Achieved By Xinteza

Xinteza API Ltd., a biosynthesis technology company, has expanded its IP portfolio with a discovery of a novel, non-cannabis plant-derived production system, which is capable of end-to-end cannabinoid synthesis. The company's IP portfolio is based on a license signed with Yeda, the commercial arm of the Weizmann Institute of Science.

Unlike Cannabis Sativa, which only produces cannabinoids in its female flowering parts, the novel expression system contains cannabinoid enzymatic machinery throughout its entire botanical tissue mass, and thus has the potential to yield a higher active-ingredient-to-biomass ratio than cannabis plants, the company says.

"This discovery is a major milestone in the path to uncover and exploit rare and new cannabinoid molecules with potentially novel pharmacological activities," stated professor Asaph Aharoni, Xinteza's scientific co-founder and head of the Weizmann Institute of Science plant metabolomics lab and of the institute's plant and environmental sciences department. "Moreover, this alternative non-Cannabaceae production system is significantly more amenable than cannabis to genetic engineering and cellular transformation, allowing greater flexibility in a range of biosynthesis enhancement and optimization processes," addedAharoni.

The development of cannabinoid biosynthesis processes has been slowed down and challenged by several enzymatic and genetic modification-related bottlenecks arising from the introduction of cannabis genes into microorganism-based fermentation systems. According to the company the discovery of a non-Cannabaceae cannabinoid-producing botanical expression system has the potential to solve and mitigate some of these problems by initiating a novel toolkit of genes and enzymatic machinery. By utilizing this new toolkit, Xinteza aims to design novel pathways for cannabinoid biosynthesis, in order to achieve higher yields and efficiencies, better consistency, purity, and cost effectiveness.

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