Kevin McKernan was leading Life Technologies Corp. (LIFE)’s Ion Torrent DNA-sequencing research when a new business opportunity caught his eye: marijuana. 
 
 A year later, McKernan, 38, has quit his job, formed a startup run from his house in Marblehead, Massachusetts, and announced today that the company had sequenced the entire genome of the cannabis plant. 
 
 The project, which cost about $200,000, may lead to the development of treatments for cancer, pain and inflammatory diseases, he said. McKernan’s company, Medicinal Genomics, is making the data public using Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN)’s EC2 cloud- computing system. McKernan called the work a “draft assembly,” and it hasn’t yet been published in a peer-reviewed academic journal. 
 
 “This is the beginning of a more scientific approach to the genetics of the species,” Richard Gibbs, director of the Human Genome Sequencing Center at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, said in a telephone interview yesterday. “This is not really about marijuana; it’s about pharmacology.” 
 
 An important step to find a species’ potential utility is to map its DNA, the building block of life, according to Gibbs, who said he has known McKernan for more than 15 years. 
 
 McKernan worked on the Human Genome Project from 1996 to 2000, and started a commercial laboratory with his two brothers called Agencourt Bioscience, which was sold to Beckman Coulter Inc. in 2005. A spin-out of Agencourt that made sequencing technology, called Agencourt Personal Genomics, was acquired by Applied Biosystems Inc., which combined with Invitrogen Corp. in 2008 to become Carlsbad, California-based Life Technologies. Life Technologies bought Ion Torrent last year for $375 million in cash and stock. 
 
 Open Access 
 
 McKernan said his company’s goal is to allow researchers to find ways to maximize the cannabis plant’s therapeutic benefits and minimize its psychoactive effects. 
 
 “These pathways can be optimized in the plant or cloned into other hosts for more efficient biologic production,” Medicinal Genomics said in a statement. “It may be possible through genome directed breeding to attenuate the psychoactive effects of cannabis, while enhancing the medicinal aspects.” 
 
 The plant makes chemical compounds called cannabinoids, a class that includes tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the main psychoactive substance in marijuana. Another such compound called cannabidiol, or CBD, has shown promise in shrinking tumors in rats without the psychoactive effects, McKernan said. 
 
 Medical Uses 
 
 “That one has been predominantly bred out of the plant as it’s been bred for recreational use,” he said. His company’s business model is to develop assays to enable regulators, government agencies or pharmaceutical companies to research cannabis’s gene pathways. 
 
 Donald Abrams, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, who has done research into medical cannabis since 1997, said scientists have been able to study the plant without knowing the genome. 
 
 “We know what the active ingredients of the plant are already,” Abrams, chief of oncology at San Francisco General Hospital, said in a telephone interview. “You don’t need the genome; you need the plant.” 
 
 Companies such as GW Pharmaceuticals Plc (GWP), based in Salisbury, England, have developed cannabis-based medicines. GW sells Sativex for muscle spasms related to multiple sclerosis, using THC and CBD. 
 
 McKernan said he was initially convinced to pursue the research after seeing papers published in academic journals including Nature on the plant’s tumor-shrinking effects in rats. 
 
 “One in three people are going to get cancer, and one in four are going to die with it or from it,” he said. “So any compound, as preliminary as this may be, that’s nontoxic and shows hope there, we should be all over. 
 
 “The only way I knew how to do that was to sequence the genome.” 
 
 To contact the reporter on this story: Meg Tirrell in New York at mtirrell@bloomberg.net. 
 
 To contact the editor responsible for this story: Reg Gale at rgale5@bloomberg.net. ||||| At last, the field of genomics has something to offer Cheech and Chong. DNA sequencing hit a new high last night with the midnight release of the Cannabis sativa genome. The raw sequence was posted on Amazon’s EC2 public cloud computing service by a young company called Medicinal Genomics, which aims to explore the genomes of therapeutic plants. 
 
 Thus far the company is only posting the raw sequence reads – meaning that the over 131 billion bases of shotgun sequence have not yet undergone the important and arduous process of being assembled into contiguous chunks. For now, the sequence is fragmented into hundreds of thousands of snippets. But Medicinal Genomics founder Kevin McKernan says he estimates the size of the C. sativa genome to be about 400 million bases – roughly three times the genome of that other weed, the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. 
 
 And in case you’re wondering: the DNA was extracted and prepped for sequencing in a laboratory in Amsterdam. 
 
 McKernan says he was turned on to the idea of sequencing cannabis by a 2003 publication in Nature Reviews Cancer about the many potential uses – including fighting cancer – of cannabinoids. C. sativa makes about sixty of the compounds. Although THC has gotten the most attention, McKernan hopes his company’s data will help scientists explore a few of the others, and perhaps guide plant breeding programs to generate new Cannabis strains. 
 
 No word yet on whether the information can also help researchers construct a van made out of marijuana, but chances are that some enthusiast out there will look into that possibility if the company follows through on its pledge to make genome annotations available as an iPad app next fall. 
 
 
 
 Also appealing to McKernan: the growing medical marijuana market, which he says is swelling by over 50% a year. “It’s going to have to be a fairly regulated market,” he says, “and regulation is going to come through genetics and fingerprinting of which strains are approved.” 
 
 McKernan’s name may ring a bell for sequencing buffs. In 2000, he cofounded Agencourt Biosciences, a spinoff of which eventually created the technology underlying the popular SOLiD sequencing platform now sold by Life Technologies. 
 
 McKernan dipped into his own bank account to launch Medicinal Genomics, and says he also has funding from the network of angel investors – mostly friends and family – that helped him get Agencourt off the ground in 2000. 
 
 Image: warrantedarrest, Flickr, creative commons.
– Marijuana is giving up its secrets: A Massachusetts company has sequenced the entire genome of the cannabis plant for the first time, reports the Nature news blog. The results from Medicinal Genomics have yet to be peer-reviewed and probably won't be published in full until next year. And the company has only the best of intentions, notes Bloomberg: “It may be possible through genome directed breeding to attenuate the psychoactive effects of cannabis, while enhancing the medicinal aspects.” In other words: Make medical marijuana more "medical" and less "marijuana." That's not to say others couldn't take the information and do the reverse. As the PopSci blog notes, the discovery eventually could have "significant implications for both the medical and recreational users of the drug" by allowing particular genes to be "isolated and concentrated." The company promises to make genome annotations available via iPhone app next fall.