Israeli medical cannabis startup MedicannX uses an aeroponic cultivation method for growing medical cannabis. To that end, the company raised $19 million in funding from Darwin Real Estate and Investments.
Aeroponics is a cutting-edge method of cultivating plants without soil. Instead, the plant’s roots are suspended in the air and nourished by a nutrient-rich mist. This innovative approach offers several advantages over traditional soil-based cultivation.
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Medical cannabis, also known as medical marijuana, is a complex topic that has generated significant debate and research in recent years. It refers to the use of cannabis and its derivatives to treat various medical conditions.
The active compounds in cannabis, such as THC (tetrahydrocannabinol) and CBD (cannabidiol), interact with the body’s endocannabinoid system. While research is ongoing, medical cannabis has shown promise in treating conditions like chronic pain, nausea, appetite loss, and certain neurological disorders.
Medicann X boasts that the firm is expertly positioned to harness these changes and use them to improve further on these technologies. “Not only do we operate using the highest technological principles of smart greenhouses, but our technology is ventured entirely indoors, without the need to radiate plants or cannabis flowers and, therefore, maintain post-harvest euGMP standards without affecting the exact healthy ingredients profiles,” says the company.
Israel Startup Nation already has a number of firms working on cannabis in all of its forms, so Medicann X is in good company. For example, Xinteza is an Israeli biosynthesis technology company that has found a way to produce cannabis type synthesis from other plants in the Cannabacae family that are not known for producing the drug commonly known as marijuana. Xinteza boasts that it has developed a new on-cannabis plant-derived production system, which the company says is capable of “highly efficient and flawless” end-to-end cannabinoid synthesis.
Then there is BetterSeeds Ltd., an Israel-based AgTech company that uses gene-editing technology including CRISPR to develop a new variety of cannabis seeds and agricultural seeds. BetterSeeds applies and improves the CRISPR-case gene editing technology to develop new, improved varieties of selected crops. The improvement is achieved by using BetterSeeds’ unique cross crop CRISPR delivery technology which enables embedding essential game-changing traits that are currently not available in major cash crops due to the limitations of conventional breeding and enhancement methods
Israeli scientists are also at the forefront of cannabis research. In 2023, researchers from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel uncovered a South African plant that produces cannabinoids. The scientists said this could point to new ways of manufacturing them for medical use. The South African plant in question is called a woolly umbrella and it is completely unrelated to the cannabis plant, yet, say the researchers, it makes a slew of the active compounds found in cannabis – cannabinoids – including some that may have new medical uses.
And in 2022, researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem successfully engineered a cannabis plant with higher levels of medically-important substances, such as THC. THC (Tetrahydrocannabinol) is the active ingredient in Cannabis.
