Rua Bioscience, originally founded to create work for Ruatōrea locals, was later turned into a listed company as it fought to become a medical cannabis company once the law was changed to allow such products and later merged with another company to take advantage of the Australian market.
Today it had a double dose of good news.
Rua Bioscience exported its first seeds to Australia, in what is understood to be New Zealand’s first legal export of cannabis genetics under the medicinal cannabis scheme. The seeds will be grown by Australia-based Cann Group and will be assessed for their commercial potential.
Managing director Anna Stove says, “This an exciting moment for the company. This seed export demonstrates the value of our relationship with Cann Group as we further establish an end-to-end cultivation and supply chain solution at scale.
Seeds blessed
“It’s taking time but we believe weaving the intergenerational plant knowledge of our team with the global cultivation scale of Cann Group will give us a significant competitive advantage. This small step demonstrates the potential of exporting unique East Coast genetics from Ruatōrea to the world.”
Before their export, the seeds were blessed by co-founder Panapa Ehau.
“Rua has been a careful kaitiaki of these seeds for some time. We have now transferred the responsibility for the care of some of that material to the team at Cann Group, who we know will also take that responsibility seriously,” he says.
Cann Group announced the GMP manufacturing licence for the company’s flagship Mildura facility, which was issued by the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) on 30 June 2022, has been extended to cover the manufacture and release of finished dried flower products for patient use. This extends the facility’s previous capabilities beyond the manufacture of dried flowers as an active pharmaceutical ingredient and hard capsule manufacturing.
Biden decision
Cann’s new A$120m cultivation and processing facility at Mildura is considered one of the largest and most advanced in Australasia, capable of producing 12,500 kilograms of dried cannabis flower per year. When complete, the capacity at the 13.5-hectare facility will grow up to 70,000 kilograms.
In a capital-light strategy, Rua is leveraging this scale to deliver a range of medicinal cannabis products to many export markets.
It’s been a hard year for the three listed medicinal cannabis companies - Rua Bioscience, Cannasouth and Greenfern Industries whose share prices collapsed over the past year.
However, the news that President Joe Biden has pardoned all US federal offences of simple marijuana possession as part of his aim of decriminalising marijuana saw the New Zealand market wind the prices back significantly.
Rua, which had seen its share price fall over the past year by -41.62% had an 8.7% gain today.