It’s All In Your Head

Licensed cannabis producers have invested millions in R&D to create innovative products that will delight their consumers and build long term value for their shareholders. Like a high performance track coach without a stopwatch, however, these producers have been missing a key scientific tool to track their considerable progress. The tools they have been using, saliva and blood tests, sensory tests, focus groups to provide feedback on packaging concepts and marketing campaigns are all valuable in their own right, but what the industry has been missing is a scientific research methodology that objectively measures the psychoactive effects cannabis products create on consumers.

I founded Zentrela in 2016 based on the idea that the only way to understand cannabis psychoactive effects is to actually study brainwave (EEG) data. I partnered with Dr. Dan Bosnyak, one of the leading neuroscientists in Canada, and together we spent five years building a proprietary neurotechnology platform (EEG hardware, data collection software, and machine learning algorithms) to detect and quantify brainwave alterations due to THC psychoactive effects. We subjected our scientific method to the rigors of an independent clinical study by KGK Science that documented the accuracy of our algorithms. The results of this study were recently published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Advances in Therapy.

Now that the accuracy of our science is a matter of record, we have been working with licensed producers to create the first scientific psychoactive effects profiles of their products. Each commercially-available product has been designed for a specific purpose and target audience.  Each organization has a different set of objectives, some are focused on psychoactive onset time, others the effect duration or maximum potency. While the results vary by product, we have learned a key lesson over our five years of work in this field. To build a comprehensive psychoactive profile for cannabis products you have to incorporate these three key variables:

1. Product Properties – While THC and CBD get the lion’s share of attention, there are a host of other “lesser” cannabinoids which combined with THC may affect the actual THC psychoactive experience. As just one example, it is well known that CBD contradicts THC psychoactive effects. It’s the whole set of cannabinoids that generates the unique experience, not just a single compound, so reducing product labelling to two simple cannabinoids (THC and CBD) is overly simplistic. To take another example, consider two products with the same amount of THC (Brand A gummy with 10mg THC, and Brand B gummy with 10mg THC). They provide very different psychoactive experiences because they contain different minor cannabinoids and they use different delivery technologies to send the cannabinoid compounds to the brain.
2. Consumption Information – the psychoactive profile of a cannabis product varies significantly based on how cannabis is consumed, how much is consumed and how long it takes to consume it.
3. Consumer Profile – probably the least understood variable will also turn out to be the most important predictor of cannabis product experience. Mood, psychological profile, THC tolerance, THC sensitivity, even weight and height  are just a few of the “human factors” that play a pivotal role in how we experience cannabis psychoactive effects. 

The key to achieve product effect predictability is to link the following three main variables. Product (X) with its unique properties, consumed by a consumer profile (Y) with his or her unique characteristics, in the following method (Z) creates a specific psychoactive effect (Cognalyzer® psychoactive effects).

Another challenge for cannabis producers is the high cost of stopwatches. The traditional clinical research model was engineered for pharmaceutical products and does not necessarily translate well for consumer products. We responded with a Data-As-A-Service (DaaS) model that delivers just the data the producer requires at a fraction of the cost of a traditional clinical research project. 

Canadian cannabis producers are exploring every R&D option imaginable to deliver the products their consumers want and the financial results their investors expect. Zentrela offers them the analytical tools to make sure they keep putting points on the scoreboard.