The objective is straightforward, but the means of achieving it less so. And it’s an objective that has the wholehearted support of doctors and pharmacists.

“What is in the market at the moment is essentially a recreational product that has active compounds, and medicinal properties, which is being sold under the banner of medicinal cannabis,” Spring Sciences Australia chief executive Dr Steve Newbery says.

The aim, he reveals, is to “change that narrative”.

Spring Sciences Australia’s Queensland facility

“We want to produce a product that is as close to a standard the pharmaceutical industry would accept and, therefore, a product that doctors and pharmacists can have complete confidence in, in terms of prescribing and dispensing to patients. That is our aim and it underpins everything we do.”

Such an objective should not be unusual in an industry that, for the foreseeable future at least, is supposed to be solely dedicated to producing a medicine.

But delivering top-quality product from plant matter has never been an easy task. Indeed, one of the enduring challenges of growing cannabis for medical use is delivering a consistent product, of the necessary quality, that produces the same therapeutic benefit to the patient time after time.

At its indoor, climate-controlled cultivation facility in Caboolture, midway between Brisbane and the Sunshine Coast, Spring Sciences is seeking to overcome those challenges.

And it is seeking to do so not only through the expertise of its cultivation team, but with a little help from Artificial Intelligence and automated technologies.

The cultivation process is being managed by specialist agriculture software, Argus Titan 900, a system which controls every aspect of the growing cycle and, in a multi-screen mission control room, displays data on every cultivation output variable throughout each stage.

The nerve centre of the Spring Sciences facility. The AI system controls every aspect of the growing cycle.

To take nothing away from the skillset of its cultivation team, it is the AI system that could hold the key to Spring Sciences’ ambition to produce truly pharmaceutical medicine.

“If there is one thing we will not compromise on it is the quality of the product,” Newbery stresses. “It underpins our entire business model.”

Prescriber engagement

Prior to switching on the facility, Spring Sciences engaged with prescribers and pharmacists to understand what the medical profession wanted, and how they observed the current landscape.

Unsurprisingly, what emerged was a picture of uncertainty, confusion and discomfort in prescribing medicinal cannabis.

“They told us they had a product that they really didn’t understand, or what it did,” Newbery recalls. “There wasn’t the depth of research normally associated with a pharmaceutical product that allows them to prescribe with confidence, for a specific ailment.

“There were several issues; the multitude of cultivars, the various chemistries, the fact that 22% THC doesn’t always mean 22%, which impacts precision dosing. What you normally equate with a medicine just hasn’t been there.

“And then you hear people say ‘oh, we’ve got 400 different cultivars’. Why? Doctors are saying they don’t know what to prescribe and that they just need four or five with a range of THC and other cannabinoid compounds that work synergistically to create distinctive and effective benefits, commonly referred to as the entourage effect. They want to know it’s of a consistent quality and to understand its efficacy.

“If you’ve got 400 cultivars, it’s just an absolute shotgun blast and that’s not what the market wants or needs.

“The question I kept asking everybody is ‘what do we grow and why?’ And no-one could answer that.”

Until now, maybe. And the answers are coming from within the Spring Sciences business.

In addition to exploring doctor sentiment, the Queensland-based cultivator is working with clinics and specialised cannabis consultants to capture data on what chemical compositions have successfully treated specific ailments.

Such revealing information will go a long way to shaping what its cultivation team will grow and lay a platform for potentially developing next-generation cannabinoid drugs.

“There’s a lot of research taking place with, for example, first responder and veteran affairs groups who are targeting particular ailments,” Newbery says. “If we can be party to that data, it will flow into our operations and answer that question of ‘what do we grow and why?’

“While The AI engine is being targeted to optimise the efficiency of the facility and to produce premium quality yield, plugging in efficacy data, and what doctors are prescribing, will help us understand what ratios of active compounds are necessary to target a specific ailment.”

The first responder and veteran space is of particular interest for Spring Sciences, driven in part by personal experiences within the team.

Spring Sciences Australia CEO Dr Steve Newbery

Newbery indicated that one in seven (14%) of more than 600,000 people who have served in the Australian Defence Forces (ADF) have suffered from some form of mental health issue in the past 12 months and 39% of 80,000 first responders require medicinal cannabis for a variety of anxiety-related conditions. It is a patient cohort that needs servicing.

Combine that with the estimated 43% (8.5 million) Australians aged 16–85 who are estimated to have experienced a mental disorder at some time in their life, with 20% (3.2 million) having experienced mental disorders in the previous 12 months, and the case for a pharmaceutical product is clearly apparent.

“Those numbers alone show there is a vast potential patient base we can tap into,” Newbery says. “We believe that the pharmaceutical market is the pre-eminent market for us.”

State-of-the-art facility

In addition to the fully automated nature of the 3,000sqm GMP-certified facility, it boasts a 480sqm micropropagation section housing tissue culture facilities, five grow rooms – each with a capacity for 3,500 plants – a post-harvest processing facility and a dedicated GMP area for extraction, distillation, storage and packaging.

At full capacity, an initiation room can support 30,000 plant embryos, with capacity to root 10,000 early-stage clones and acclimatise 3,500 plants.

Micropropagation is “central to the strategy”, Newbery says, with the six-week cycle ensuring “agile production”, beginning with five distinct strains characterised by their CBD, THC and terpene profiles.

“Our goal is to expand this genetic library to over 100 genotypes – we currently have 30 – and develop in-house hybrid cultivars, with specific prescription-backed efficacies,” he adds.

The acclimatisation room

Initially, the company has capacity to produce 10 tonnes of non-irradiated dried flower, a figure that could double once the facility expands in tandem with the market.

“We have the ability to go from tissue culture to commercial harvest in six months, so if there are dramatic shifts on the flower side of the market we can quickly respond,” Newbery says. “However, if doctors continue to evolve their understanding of cannabis as a medicine, they’re not going to get sucked into these dramatic swings in market requirements by recreational users.

“Regardless, if we are producing a premium quality product with a strong entourage effect, which covers a multitude of bases, then it will cover both the pharmaceutical and recreational markets.

“And our view is that if we develop an ongoing reputation for quality flower, we will pivot fairly seamlessly if and when adult use becomes legal.”

High yields

Among the most eye-catching elements of the facility is the yields that can be achieved through the technology and cultivation methods.

Through the multi-tiered racking design of the grow rooms, each one can accommodate 3,500 plants with LED lighting, climate-controlled heating, ventilation and air conditioning, fertigation systems and sensors to optimise grow conditions.

“Yield of dry flower per square metre of cultivation space is a key metric, and our team is targeting anywhere between 1,100 and 1,500g,” reveals Newbery. “A lot of people have said that’s totally unrealistic, no-one in the industry is within cooee of that. But our sister company in the US is now achieving 1500g/m2 and our first harvest was just under 800/m2, the base figure used for our financial modelling. So we are off to a good start.

“It shows the capabilities of the facility. Technology has advanced, and our understanding of how to best utilise that technology has advanced, and that is translating into higher yields.”

Early-stage flowering in one of Spring Sciences’ five grow rooms

And those higher yields will drive down operational costs and, ultimately, enable Spring Sciences to produce high-quality medicine for all patients, at all price points, says Newbery.

He emphasises that the quality of the product will be identical regardless of the price. What will lower the cost of some products will be non-medical elements such as the “bag appeal”, or the general aesthetics of the medicine.

“Everyone should be entitled to premium quality medicine, and that is what they will get from us,” he says. “Just because people are on a pension, or come from a lower socioeconomic background, does not mean they should accept inferior product for a medicine that is underpinning their health. We won’t produce substandard buds and I believe, as the industry evolves, low-to-medium quality product will fall by the wayside.”

Newbery is also adamant that inhalation as a route of administration, particularly dry flower, is far from ideal in a medical context.

To that end, Spring Sciences is putting deals together with “like-minded global entities” that will enable its flower products to be faithfully replicated “in whatever form we want without the vagaries of flower”.

“I’ve always believed that Australia is a nation of non-smokers, so why do we give them a product which they have to inhale?” he says. “It’s nonsensical to expect someone in their 70s or 80s who might be suffering from a high degree of arthritis to grind flower.

“We recently announced the important partnership with Verve Dynamics South Africa, world leaders in phytoextracts. Verve’s propriety extraction and drug compounding technology can extract the components of a flower with very specific chemistry, and re-formulate it into a medicine that can be taken with precision. This is a very exciting development for us and means we will be able to provide the chemistry of the flower in more precise and easy-to-administer forms.”

Outdoor cultivation

In a sign of its expansion ambitions, in addition to its best-in-class indoor facility, Spring Sciences is planning a series of satellite outdoor grows to provide product for extraction. But Newbery reveals that one project to develop a 100-acre site in New South Wales was knocked back by authorities “simply because I think they were terrified by the size of the facility we were looking to build”.

Smaller satellite grows of around 20 acres are planned in Queensland, although he admits it will be at least a two-year project given the lengthy nature of the licensing and permit process.

For the time being, Spring Sciences is focused on maximising the potential of its indoor facility. Doing so will boost yields and reduce costs, Newbery says.

“Quality and cost competitiveness. That is a powerful combination.”

Steve has reported for a number of consumer and B2B titles over a journalism career spanning more than three decades. He is a regulator contributor to health journal, The Medical Republic, writing on...

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