Episode Transcript

Transcript

Trevor: Kirk we’re back.

Kirk: Hey, Trevor, how's it going?

Trevor: Good, you might notice my face is redder than usual. I was out fishing this afternoon, so this is some combination of wind slash sunburn. But it was a gorgeous day out on Lake Dauphin. Yeah, it was good time had by all.

Kirk: Did you catch any fish?

Trevor: We did. We were just saying that, you know, this is a lovely spot and not much wind. And it was beautiful out there. And, you know, there may have been a beverage or two consumed, but you know, we’d be happy even if we didn't catch anything. And bam, we caught I think about 3 oversized pickerel, meaning they're too big to legally keep and lost a few.  And unfortunately, fortunately, unfortunately I had this pre-planned, so I had to come back off the lake and Pat and Alan are still out there, hopefully catching more.

Kirk: You could have always texted me and I would have said sunburn, my friend sunburn.

Trevor: Yeah, well anyway. So, ice fishing, one of the things we do way up here in Canada and we're going to chat with another Canadian, Akeem Gardener, and one of the things we're sort of, we met him originally way down South in Florida and he's going back. And doing even some more presentations about stuff that Canurta was doing this time around.

Kirk: Right, well, we first met him in Episode 106 when you were down in CannMed23. At that point, what he was the CEO of a biotech company, Canurta, and he talked about cannflavins, yes. And his nephew is a basketball player, which has become significant in the story.

Trevor: I think his nephew is not quite,  is still very young, but you know Akeem is an enormous basketball fan. And, you know has the, you know, slightly high goals of getting his nephew to eventually be better than arguably the best basketball player on the planet. But you know, we'll chat about that a little bit. But yeah, last year, Akeem was talking about glioblastoma, which is a particularly nasty brain tumor and how cannflavins might be helpful in treating that. And this year he's kind of at, he's going to do some presentations at CannMed about how there are more stuff that they think they can treat and there's even a little bit of stuff at AI and other magic going on there. So yeah, it was nice to catch up to Akeem should we jump into that and talk a little more the other end.

Kirk: We can, but I think the listeners should know that there's at least two businesses involved here, right? Canurta Naturals and the Canurta Therapeutics, right, so.

Trevor: Yeah. Yeah, kind of a research arm and a let's make a product we can sell arm.

Kirk: Right. I think he mentioned that. So, yeah, just, ok, let's get into it.

Trevor: Akeem, welcome back.

Akeem Gardner: Thank you for having me.

Trevor: So, since we talked last, you have been literally all over the world. I've seen places like Dubai and Europe and where have you been and what have you been doing for the last number of months?

Akeem Gardner: Ohh the last number of months we've been busy. Busy hustling around trying to get to know everyone and introduce everyone literally, like you said all around the world to Canada. So, we've been in the UAE, we've been in Saudi Arabia, we went to Switzerland for an event. What else can I remember? I can't remember it all, but those are the highlights of the last couple of months we've been to BIO a couple of times in the US. So just putting ourselves out there at all the major events in front of different communities of people who have a lot of questions about longevity, about research, about clinical trials, about aging, age-related diseases and inflammation, and people who may not have initially thought ohh “Maybe plants.” Maybe plants like industrial hemp, or cannabis might have the answers so it's been a fun couple of months.

Trevor: Excellent. And you know what, that sort of segues nicely int. the first thing I want to ask you about. So, there are so many things in the cannabis plant, you know, depending on who you talk to, hundreds, maybe thousands of different molecules in there. And last time we talked, we talked about what you were doing with potential treatments for glioblastoma. When you have a plant as diverse as cannabis, how do you decide? What kind of research you want to do or where you want to focus?

Akeem Gardner: Oh well, we are very lucky to be advised by some of the world's smartest have been studying this plant a very, very long time. People like Dr. Ethan Russo, who has been involved in clinical trials and numerous different publications. Who has seen what each individual component may, might do and let me not say each but many different individual components might do, but also what they do in combination with each. So, with people like Dr. Russo on our team with some of the modern day advancements in things like artificial intelligence and then now with our ability to extract and produce some of these novel molecules like the cannflavins in purified form, we can have a robust preclinical trial process that can start with anything from a recommendation go to pre-clinical call screening and then go into preclinical trials. And then once we know, and once we see what the science and the data is telling us, then we, then people like me get to make the decisions of, OK, we're gonna put a lot of emphasis in this area or that area. So, similar to the glioblastoma Cancer theme, that we did last year. We said we're gonna focus on neurology because we know we have neuroprotective activity and inflammation. Cancer will continue as a program that we're still doing at the University of Guelph, but we know that we have much more evidence about how we can be neuroprotective in diseases that are involved with neuro inflammation and then other inflammatory related diseases like the rheumatoid arthritis. Uh. And the dementia related diseases that come with aging.

Trevor: That's fascinating, and I really want to talk more on the neurodegenerative stuff, but because it's sexy and I've dabbled that I think everyone's dabbled in it along the way. Can you tell me a little bit more about what AI is doing to sort of help your decision process about where you're going and what molecules look at?

Akeem Gardner: Well, it's, we're using it in two phases as a company. One is for screening and for thinking about new flavinnoid like medicines, which is a whole process that we won't get into too much about right now. But the most, more important part, is in regards to and encelois screening. And doing taking a precision medicine approach at drug development. So, one of the things that we're working on doing, we might be able to present some of this at CannMed this year, if our experiment finishes and our data comes back, but we'll definitely present it at the end of the year. When we do preclinical trails in mice or zebrafish or any different type of study. What you have is the ability to extract the RNA and send it for gene sequencing, right? And there you get a lot of different data back about what's been upregulated or what's been downregulated in the tissue of the subject that you were looking to treat in that trial. And then what we have the ability to do is use that with different models to cross reference our data and what happened in that, in our case, in our neurodegenerative study we're doing, it in zebrafish. What happened in the zebrafish versus what we're finding in different, in our case ALS subjects, in human databases that are out there in. The real world because a lot of the different groups like the ALS TDI Foundation or Answer ALS Foundation or so on and so forth. They have all this data put together in a database that they give to the public to companies like ours or to research students or whatnot to say, hey, look what you can see what you can find. What correlations might there be between what you're looking to do and a novel therapeutic or novel drug, or so on and so forth. So we have a couple of biopractitioners on our team that have allowed us to start to take that approach. In regards to when we have an idea about a new molecule, no molecule or a new formulation based on what we're seeing in our early studies, whether it be invitro, in cells or invitro, in animal what might that actually turn out to be in human studies, and that allows us to just make more educated guesses as we go down the path of drug development.

Trevor: That's fascinating. OK. So neurodegenerative diseases. So, top of my head, you know, we've got like Parkinson's and Dementia and you've mentioned ALS. But let's, we'll back it up a little bit. You think, not just you think, the scientific community thinks they're a lot to do with inflammation in the brain. So, is that sort of what you think some of the cannflavins and other molecules you're looking at will affect or how do you think these treatments might work well?

Akeem Gardner: Yes, yes and yes, maybe and yes, right. So, the thing about the human body and about, neurodegeneration and different diseases like Parkinson's and ALS, even Alzheimer's is that they're very, very complex. And even in the modern-day literature, we don't really know what's causing them. So the challenge is, that to be able to treat or help manage some of the symptoms from all these diseases to be able to extend lifespan, you sort of have to use this cocktail approach of giving the patient many different things that do many different things to treat everything that might be going on all at once, right. So, in regards to things like ALS, for example, there's four proved treatments in the US right now that might roll back to three because there was some news this morning about a failed phase three trial. We could talk about that later, but the practitioners, what they actually do when they see their patients because ALS is two to five years post the diagnosis to mortality, sometimes even faster. They just give the patient, put them on all three of them, right, because they don't know what specifically is wrong with the patient. They don't know what's leading to the neurodegeneration right there is chronic inflammation involved and inflammation of the spinal cord and the CNS I should say in that disease, but that might not be the only thing. So for us, we're very fortunate to be working in the cannabis plants from the beginning of time. Many people in ancient civilization has known that this plant has neuroprotective properties like Emperor shen-Nung said in 2700 BCE that the seed is sweet, it will make one fat, strong, but you'll never go senile Right. Later in the 9th,  century.

Trevor: Kirk's gonna love that quote.

Akeem Gardner: People love and, this is why , cannabis is so important, because we've known from the beginning of time, right? Like later when I went to the UAE and when I went to Riyadh, I was like, do you guys know who Al Kindi is? He's one of the famous medicine men from Syria in the 9th century. He said hashish, it eases the muscles of the limbs and what flows, so it helps you with your spasticity. It helps you. It helps reduce the seizures that may come from epilepsy, so on and so forth. And in more modern times, we know this to be the case. We've seen what companies like GW Pharma has done. We've seen the effects of how companies like Charlottes Webb has been able to impact people all over the world, right. So, I'm very excited that what we have the ability to do, is use a lifetime of human history worth of information about the safety and the. efficacy of this plant on different neural degenerative diseases and then specifically put together a cocktail mixture based on what we know. Each of the individual cannabinoids, terpenes, polyphenols and anything else that are in the plant, we can put it together, specifically standardize it to be able to put together a formulation that we believe will help people with ALS that are dealing with their symptoms, improve their quality of life, and might even provide the neural protection provided to be disease modifying as well. And what's exciting again about formulations like this, but also about the history? Is that it's not only things like ALS. There's other neurodegenerative diseases like FTD, like Alzheimer's, TB, TBI, so on and so forth that this formulation should work. And so at Cannmed  this year, I'll give a talk and I'll start, I'll share a little bit about where we've come from the literature begins and what we know today, and then we'll continue to try to advance this as quickly as possible to human clinical trial. Sometime within the next 12 to 24 months so that we can continue to follow this up with the right data required to bring this to different regulators, Health Canada, the FDA on the EMA, so on and so forth.

Trevor: And that's really interesting, now sort of a theme that's popped up over and over again, and it's not surprising with Dr. Russo on the team that we're talking about like an entourage effect kind of thing. With but be from the pharmaceutical world. Usually, we're talking about 1 molecule ,1 indication and that's not sort of how cannabis works. We think you know a bunch of molecules, for one indication, but from people we've talked to, it sounds like it is difficult to get approval for cocktail of molecules for one indication. Do you know, we are not at that stage yet, but do you think if all your trials go through properly, you'll be able to do the get a patent or an approval or whatever for cocktail for one indication or how do you think that's going to go?

Akeem Gardner: Ohh well, we're definitely betting the house on it, right. And we think it's possible. Again, as I said, I was in Switzerland for the international ALS MND conference and when I was talking to the practitioners and even in the presentations, they admitted they take up Poly-pharmacological approach at treating their patients. They don't treat the patients with just one thing. They treat the patients with multiple things. They do the same thing in cancer because cancer is so complex. And it can be terminal if you don't catch it on time and if you don't kill the tumor. So, it's not just one thing that they use is chemotherapy plus something else. It is combination therapies. So whereas in the former regime of healthcare, medicine and how we used to think about things, it might be like, what's the one thing that we can prove that this one medicine does and then go after it and show it very clearly in a clinical trial when it comes to the overall benefit of the patient. And for actually giving them the best chance that it is to succeed you need to use multiple things. The world doesn't just work everything's not 1 + 1 = 2. So, albeit a little bit confusing in regards to when you think about the concept of putting many things into one thing to get that one thing to do many things right. It’s really what people are doing right now in practice anyways. The challenges is, can you standardize that one thing so that more often than not, and I'll even say more often, more than more often than not, because that's like 50% can 80, 90 to 95% of the time that one thing, do those many things the same, right. And that's the challenge we think we know how to do it. There is precedent of it being done from other companies around the world in regards to botanical drugs and even cannabis. We just have to follow the steps and the road map that they've already laid out for us.

Trevor: That, I like that a lot and I really I really hope this, you know, entourage of things. Botanical ingredients from cannabis really does help because neurodegenerative diseases, there's lots of them, and unfortunately, as the population ages, things like Alzheimer's, all the neurodegenerative diseases are just going to increase as the population ages. So, this would be fantastic if it works as well, so anything else that Canurta has been doing lately that we sort of missed on, we've sort of talked a lot about the brain, any other sort of parts of the body that you guys are looking at?

Akeem Gardner: Well, we're starting in the brain because again, this is what we have the most advanced formulation for and what we have the most data on, but we will come back around to the other inflammatory related diseases, the arthritis, the mucotitis, the dermatitis, so on and so forth. As we continue to go those programs might be a little bit earlier, but we have the time to be able to really nail down our formulations and our unique products for each of those, because we have our lead in cannabis asset as well. The other thing that I'll say that we're doing and the thing that I'm probably most excited about is, albeit we're starting in cannabis because of the opportunity that Canada gave us when they legalized first. But as we know, different indigenous populations of the world have been using plants from all over to heal various ailments and diseases. From the beginning of time. So, I've been sort of going on this rabbit hole of learning to understand what can different plants do as well that might complement what we know about our molecules in cannabis, but also what might lead us to different molecules that are rare in plants that have been undiscovered but that might be able to help us suffering from a variety of different things. So, this is where we're using AI again for pick screenings. For understandings of what's in plants to see if we can identify the most ideal formulations for different things based on the literature and the data that's out there today, and I'm very excited that as we continue to grow in our organization, we will have the ability to intake different plants from around the world to concentrate what's in them and then work to isolate, purify, do NNR and get a fuller form of understanding of what nature actually gave us. All around the world since the beginning of time to help us be the best humans to help our animals be the healthiest that they can be, and so that we can give back these gifts to the people and animals of the world.

Trevor: That's very cool. Oh, my head's getting hit by sunshine. That really builds on some of Dr. Russo's early work as a as an ethnobotanist. So that's fantastic that, coming back up. So, you know now the hard-hitting journalist questions. So now that LeBron James has broken 40,000 points, do you still think your nephew has a chance to surpass him.

Akeem Gardner: You know what? We got to get to the league at like 17. And then he gotta just follow the LeBron James playbook, just like pretty much like what we're doing. You gotta pay $1,000,000 for your body every year. So you could pay like 25 years if we could do that, who knows. Exactly.

Trevor: Akeem, I could talk to you for hours, but this is, you know, you're a busy guy and we've only got you for a short time. Is there anything else that I forgot to ask? Anything else you think our listeners need to know about you or cannabis or what's coming up.

Akeem Gardner: Nothing at the top of mind. Again, as I said, we'll be at CannMed this year. I'm really enjoy that conference, really enjoy. I will enjoy being able to sit down and talk to you as well there so. Anyone who wants to hear the early of what's going on in 2024 about in cannabis in botanical medicines should be there. I'm excited for everything that will follow and as we keep on going, I will make it out to the Prairie provinces soon. So, we will be able to connect there as well, OK, but definitely not in the winter. We'll do it in the summer.

Trevor: No, not much. Nice in the summer. So, Kirk, because as usual, you're more diligent about this than I am, The Canurta  web site. You were impressed.

Kirk: I am. He's got lots of stuff there, that web page is chalked full of research papers, information about the technology they're doing. They're very transparent in what they're doing. One of the things I found very curious and you'll love this Trevor, and I'm surprised you didn't find out about and talked to him about it but it says, I love the comment and it says. “Restoring truth In drug development with blockchain.”

Trevor: Yeah, yeah, they've got lots of buzzword. I'm not trying to be facetious, but yes, sort of using blockchain technology to kind of make sure you don't fudge stuff and the other sort of buzzy term that we did bring up in the interview was they're using AI Artificial Intelligence to help them weed out what they should be doing research on, because as we've mentioned, as many people, there is probably hundreds, maybe thousands of different stuff in a cannabis plant and you know what's worth doing research on. Some of that is probably better figured out by a computer. And you know, the computer says I've looked through these 500 cannabinoids or cannflavins or terpenes. And you know, here's half a dozen that I think are worth doing research on. And it I'm, I'm sure I'm greatly oversimplifying this sorry Akeem, but having AI sort of present that to some humans and go here's my top ten, top 6, whatever picks, sounds very interesting.

Kirk: They literally have algorithms on their web page about how they use technology. It's fascinating, it's very transparent. The blockchain. I don't want to skirt over that. My understanding of the blockchain is that this allows anybody to truly get into the research of this company, how this company does their research. So, the ethics of the company, the step by step things the company does. Blockchain. There's no secrets within a blockchain, correct?

Trevor: Right. And again you and I are, neither of us are blockchain experts, but that's supposed to is the open Ledger thing. You know, it's permanently written down in electronic Ledger. So you know, I can't go back and.

Kirk: Yes.

Trevor: Say fudge my results or change how it said I was going to do this experiment or you know, it's kind of permanently there that everybody can see what I did and what I'm going to do.

Kirk: It's a very cool business plan to show your processes so transparently. I found also interesting one of the reasons why I returned to the web page cause I did go back to the webpage when we did, when we first met him, but I wanted to go back this time because I wanted to know what the deliverables are and that's why I mentioned it up front, that there are two companies. They have their naturals company now, they're that they're basically science LED Wellness products. So they're launching their first Natural Health Brands later in 2024, essentially these what I see here is a company that is producing plant medicine supplements in a manner that is very transparent and cannabis is, I'm assuming cannabis is a big part of what they're doing, but they go on about other biologicals they're using as well. So, they're a diverse company, Trevor. It's was a good interview.

Trevor: It was, and I I'll throw one that I'm surprised you didn't jump all over being our history nerd amongst the two of us.  I really like, I think it was the Chinese Emperor quote I'm going to butcher it by the equivalent of you. You get fat and strong, but you won't lose your mind with I really thought. That should be on a T-Shirt and Kirk will love this one.

Kirk: Yeah, yeah, yeah. The whole thing about not going senile, but yet ironically one of the often experienced effects of cannabis has your short term memory seems to take a snooze. So yeah, good to know my.

Trevor: Yes, but you and I both know forgetting where you put your keys is just normal. Forgetting how to drive a car is dementia. So there are different things.

Kirk: Well, that's very true. And. And they do say that every time you have a memory, you reformat a path in your brain for that memory. So you never store the same memories in the same place. That's why I can never find my keys. You see, because it's never stored in the memory in the same place.

Trevor: Ah.

Kirk: Just saying.

Trevor: Well. See all the things we learned on this podcast. So Kirk, again, I always enjoy talking with the Akeem and, you know, being a good Canadian boy, we're going to claim him as our own and we're happy he's out there representing the country doing the country, proud and honestly all  the areas he, they are looking at all the well called neurodegenerative diseases. They're huge, huge problems for society as a whole, you know, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, ALS, like, you know, we don't have good, good treatments. Or we need better for all of those. So this is some lofty goals there they're shooting.

Kirk: Yeah, one of the notes I made in about the episode was basically they're not quite doing the entourage effect, but they're not doing the single molecule thing, so there is, there is a potential for them to link different Cannadial  to find the right mixture. I thought that was also very cool. It's almost it's almost big Pharma on the supplement side.

Trevor: Yeah, and they do skate that entourage effect line where you know if you have the person, you know as we've talked lots of practitioners who they want to use the whole plant to treat disease X which makes a lot of sense and works well. And then we want. And then there's big Pharma that to get license and money wants to take out this molecule and throw it at that indication. Probably who knows, but as with many of these things, the magic answer is probably somewhere down the middle, right?

Kirk: Yeah, it's a good story. It's good to see that it's a Canadian business and yeah, good on you. You'll see them when you go down there. I guess when you get down to CanMed24.

Trevor: Yeah. By the time. Yes. By the time this goes it, I will, you know, Akeem will officially be a peaker and I'm going to be on one of the business panels, capital markets panel. So yeah, it looks like I'm going back to Florida, at least one more time.

Kirk: Take a hat this time, right?

Trevor: You've noticed the bald head have you. All right everybody, it was another good one. I'm Trevor Sheffield. I'm the pharmacist.

Kirk: I'm Kirk Nyquist. I'm the registered nurse, and you can find us at Reefer Medness -The Podcast at @reefermed.ca that where this episode and all of its links will be posted. Get a song from him.

Trevor: All right, another good one, we'll talk. He owes me another ,he owes me another e-mail. We'll see. Or we can go with what's on your shirt?

Kirk: I would like to go what's on my shirt. I had. I had Dead Bob come visit me a few weeks back. They were doing a tour across the Prairie provinces and they came and they came and harbourinated at our house for an evening and they went off to play in Winnipeg and I will play a Dead Bob song.