By Vjosa Isai, Staff Reporter
What can brainwaves tell us about a cannabis high?
Zentrela Inc., a Hamilton-based startup, wants to find out by measuring cognitive impairment using neural signals and machine learning.
Last month, the company received $850,000 in seed funding to build its data-as-a-service platform for producers and retailers with a focus on mapping the effects of “cannabis 2.0” products like extracts and edibles.
Israel Gasperin, a former graduate student in McMaster University’s entrepreneurship program, founded the startup through the school’s business incubator, The Forge.
Gasperin was initially attracted to neurotechnology research in 2016, as the looming legalization of cannabis raised questions about how it would shape safety protocols in the transportation sector, which also grapples with driver fatigue issues.
Modern drug tests measure the presence and concentration of cannabinoids such as THC — known as the main psychoactive ingredient in cannabis — in a consumer’s saliva, urine or blood. These cannabis compounds can linger for more time than the high, Gasperin said, spurring the company to create a test “that actually measures drug effects, rather than concentration levels of a drug substance in the body.”
The company raised $1.2 million from government agencies and non-profits, including the Ontario Brain Institute, in 2019, to build an electroencephalogram, or EEG, prototype called the “Cognalyzer®,” which collects brainwaves from research participants.
Gasperin teamed up with Dan Bosnyak, a neuroscientist and technical director of the university’s LIVE (Large Interactive Virtual Environment) Lab, a performance hall where researchers can test and investigate wide-ranging behavioural responses, social interactions and technologies.
Bosnyak, Zentrela’s chief scientific officer, has been researching brain signal analysis and EEG technology for more than 25 years, and says the wearable technology industry is expanding data-collection capacity.
Zentrela is collecting data “to the same standards that I would conduct in my lab at McMaster,” Bosnyak said, adding that with commercial projects, “there’s a certain give-and-take. I have my standards that I try to enforce.”
The company commissioned an arm’s-length evaluation of their technology last year, he said, and hopes to soon have the trial results published in a peer-reviewed journal.
“Because we knew that our technology was kind of groundbreaking and people might not necessarily accept that, if we just said that it works,” he said, adding that the external research company’s test results are “basically the same as what we’re getting in internal research.”
Its latest $850,000 in funding is comes from Calgary-based investment firm Jornic Ventures, and will support the creation of a database documenting the effects of cannabis products. Gasperin said the plan is to license product effect data to retailers.
“That’s the value that we are adding to producers so they can … differentiate their products and explain to consumers in a scientific way, what are the effects that their products will create on them, because that is our end goal: to promote safe and responsible cannabis use,” Gasperin said.
