Recently Aurora Cannabis announced they’d defend their intellectual property (IP) against any companies infringing on it. While they did not mention any companies specifically, there are several potentially infringing on their IP that could be targeted in the future. Hyasynth Biologicals could be one of those targets.

On May 21st, 2020 Hyasynth filed a patent application describing a biosynthetic pathway that includes the use of a patented step in the pathway. The application is structured in a very interesting way, it cites one of the patents owned by Aurora covering a step in the pathway they’ve circumvented. Instead of citing the patent they haven’t circumvented (which is not mentioned at all), they cite the corresponding scientific paper that was published alongside the patent. If they are using the pathway described in the patent application they filed last year they would be infringing on Aurora’s IP. Only 4 months after Hyasynth filed this patent application they announced they had reached commercial scale production of CBD and made their first sale. This doesn’t leave much time for them to have made and implemented significant changes to their yeast production system that would have allowed them to produce CBD while circumventing existing IP.

Hyasynth Biologicals has also recently published an oddly worded press release that should raise eyebrows. In the press release they claim:

“On April 13, 2021 the company received a grant on US patent no 10,975,395 covering the use of its novel cannabinoid biosynthesis pathway in yeast. The pathway is the first of its kind to be identified from a non-plant source, and reduces the number of enzymatic steps required to reach cannabidiol by ≈75%. This makes it significantly more efficient than the known pathway from Cannabis and allows Hyasynth to rapidly engineer new yeast strains.”

The figure below is a picture of the cannabinoid biosynthetic pathway. There are only 4 enzymatic steps from the simple input of hexanoyl-CoA to cannabidiol (CBD):

Claiming to have reduced the ‘number of enzymatic steps required to reach cannabidiol by ≈75%’ means they’re claiming to have engineered the entire pathway in 1 enzymatic step, which isn’t what the patent cited in the press release describes at all. What the patent actually describes is the production of olivetol and methyl olivetol from hexanoyl-CoA, neither of which are native inputs for the next step in the cannabinoid biosynthetic pathway (let alone being CBD itself). You can see on the figure above that olivetol is a potential byproduct of TKS, while olivetolic acid is the native input to the next step. Hyasynth has yet to describe a system where they can produce olivetolic acid without infringing on existing IP. I can’t fathom why they would misrepresent the contents of the patent they were just granted in such a significant way.

The preceding is the opinion of the author, and is in no way intended to be a recommendation to buy or sell any security or derivative. The author holds no position in Aurora Cannabis or Organigram.