CanBreed, a leading Israeli cannabis genetics and seeds company, announced on Tuesday that as part of its R&D efforts to develop Powdery Mildew resistance in cannabis, it has detected the first ever successful genome editing event in cannabis.
The milestone was achieved using the CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing technology, which awarded its inventors this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
While humans have been making genetic modifications in cannabis plants through selective breeding and various other methods for centuries, this is the first time an attempt by a commercial company to edit the cannabis plant using CRISPR-Cas-9 technology has been successful, according to CanBreed.
The company says that using genome editing capabilities, they will be able to develop plants which exhibit improved agronomical traits, essential for large scale, high-quality and cost-efficient cultivation.
CanBreed’s CEO, Ido Margalit, added “As a young Israeli company, we are very excited and proud to present this extraordinary achievement, which will change the face of cannabis cultivation in Israel and around the world."
This announcement comes after CanBreed secured a commercial license to the foundational CRISPR-Cas9 patents from the patent holders – Corteva Biosciences and Broad Institute (of MIT and Harvard Universities).
CanBreed has applied for a number of patent applications which cover some of the most essential agronomical traits in cannabis, such as a resistance to Powdery Mildew (one of the most common and acute diseases in cannabis cultivation) and achieving flowering independent of day length.
Genetic modifications such as these would help make both industrial (hemp) and recreational/medical (cannabis) crops much more sustainable, increasing the economic viability and profitability of both types of crop in the future.
"Such developments will enable CanBreed to provide cannabis cultivators with the much-needed solution of uniform and enhanced cannabis plants that will pave the road to the standardization of the industry," Margalit added.
The announcement comes after three years of arduous research by CanBreed’s R&D team, which is composed of geneticists, molecular biologists and agronomists that joined CanBreed from leading research institutes and seed companies in Israel with the goal of increasing the profitability of cannabis farming.