BCBusiness

28 BCBusiness FEBRUARy 2018 A s a result, Page is a sought- after speaker at academic and pot industry confer- ences. He's also recently leveraged decades of experi- ence with this controversial plant and its constituent chemical compounds, the cannabinoids—some hailed as an unrivalled therapy for pain, nau- sea, anxiety and other conditions—into a thriving business. Page's Anandia Labs, a testing and research •irm, is one of the brighter lights in B.C.'s fast-growing cannabis space. As president and chief scienti•c o cer, he has steered it from a startup with a skeletal sta- of four in 2016 to a company with $3.5 million in annual rev- enue, a valuation of $60 million and a sta- of 24 highly educated scientists. For Page and Anan- dia, testing pot is a means to an end: developing new marijuana varieties for medical and non- medical use. Backers of the private com- pany he founded with chemist John Coleman have high hopes. "I think Anandia could be the leading cannabis company not just in Canada but in North America," says investor Marc Lustig, CEO of Ottawa-based CannaRoyalty Corp. "There's a fantastic syner™y between Page's genetics experience and John Coleman's chemistry background." Page, who has the lanky build of a basketball forward and thick black hair peppered with grey, leads me to a room •lled with scores of tiny canna- bis seedlings growing in a sterile medium of agar. "High-quality genetics will be the cornerstone of Anandia's future growth," he says. The air is sweet and slightly skunky, like that of a small grow-op, but security here is almost Fort Knox– level: as mandated by Health Canada, all entrances and the doorways between labs can only be unlocked with a code. In the short term, cannabis testing is Anandia's lucrative bread and but- ter, given that Health Canada requires all producers licensed under the Access to Cannabis for Medical Purposes Regulations to test each harvest before going to market. Page admits he didn't anticipate the magnitude of demand for this service. And if you think it involves lounging around the o ce lighting up and hitting the vending machine for snacks, guess again. At a fee of $1,125 for •ve tests measuring potency (the level of tetrahy- drocannabinol, or THC, the compound that gets users high), arsenic and other heavy metals, a¡atoxins, microorganisms and pesticides, this is complex biochemis- try with a •ve- to seven-day turnaround. "Some people ask me if I had some sort of crystal ball. Did I know marijuana was going to be big?" Page asks on this grey November day as bland as the three- storey institutional structure, tucked in a warren of academic buildings a block from Wreck Beach, where Anandia leases space from UBC. "I guess I had an idea, but really I was just fascinated with medicinal plants." Big is an understatement when it comes to the burgeoning medicinal and recreational pot industry. As Can- ada lurches toward legalization—Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's Liberals plan to bring Bill C¨45 into law by this summer— it's home to 64 publicly traded cannabis companies. (Ontario's Canopy Growth Corp. is the world's largest such player, with a market capitalization of about $3.6 billion as of December 2017.) There are 69 licensed cannabis pro- ducers across the country, according to Health Canada, 16 of them in B.C. alone. "Every batch has to be tested, so that means our business is growing," Page says. The 48-year-old scientist took the long road from academic research to business. Born with a twin brother (now a biologist) in Victoria in 1969, Page grew up in the Comox Valley. There he inhabited a laid- back Vancouver Island culture where attitudes to marijuana and hallu- cinogens like magic mushrooms were much more permissive than the prohibitionist mainstream ethos of the day. As a kid, Page— a botanist before he knew what the word meant—spent hours poking around under logs for wild mushrooms and scouring his parents' rural property for interesting plants. "I was never a druggie, but I was very interested in hallucinogens and plants with medicinal properties and cul- tural signi•cance," says the rec- reational cannabis user. A fter high school, Page enrolled at UBC (he pondered studying ethnobotany but gravi- tated to research and the labora- tory), where he earned a B.Sc. in plant biolo™y. His honours thesis landed him in a lab then run by the late and respected professor emeritus of botany Neil Towers. As part of his studies, Page trav- elled to Tanzania for •eld research on chimpanzees' use of medicinal plants. By the time he completed a PhD in botany at UBC in 1998, his work had appeared in top academic publications like The Plant Jour- nal and Genome Bioloy. A Natural Sci- ences and Engineering Research Council of Canada ( NSERC) grant took him to Germany for post-doctoral studies of the alkaloids in opium, then cannabis. "At the time, we knew a lot about what "H E A LT H C A N A DA D I D N ' T H AV E T H E S TA F F to h A n d l e t h e I N F Lux O F I N T E R E S T I N C A N N A B I S. i t Felt l ik e A ru s h to g e t i n to A r o c k c o n c er t" – J O natha n Pag e

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