For some people, the idea of a cannabis lab stirs up visuals of an illicit facility hidden away in a secret location. In contrast, modern-day cannabis research facilities focus on extracting key compounds from raw, difficult, unprocessed material. “The majority of the business is an agro-chem business, and it's not super sexy, nor is it exciting. It's heavily chemical engineering and agriculturally based chemistry,” said Jeff Wu, Investor of Chemyx and a cannabis extraction lab investor.
Because of its history of prohibition, cannabis has been largely unexplored scientifically. Scientists charting this new type of chemical extraction are faced with pioneering an entirely new field of chemical engineering. “A lot of what we're doing right now is almost trial and error, where we're researching with a variety of acids and oxidizers for isomerizations and dehydrogenations for making novel compounds. But there really hasn't even been proper R&D done on this,” said ...
