Greenlight to go for US expansion

GREENLIGHT Medicines, an Irish medicinal cannabis research company, is set to complete an €8m funding round as it prepares for entry into the US market.

The company, which received a €1.8m investment from Canadian-listed SOL Group last year, is about to launch in California, where it is set to form a joint venture with People Science, a US clinical trials organisation, supplying medicinal cannabis in the market.

The joint venture is set to work with Eaze, a US-based medicinal cannabis delivery company, where Greenlight will supply 300 prescribing consultants who will prescribe its formulations. Eaze will manage the logistics of the joint venture.

Through the venture, Greenlight will gather data from the patients of the consultants for clinical trials as well as generating revenue from the sales.

The €8m funding will help Greenlight fund its California project and some of its clinical trials and projects in Ireland and the UK. It will also be used to support its new project in Ghana, where it is cultivating THC cannabis.

Greenlight’s Ghana project came about through some of its investors, with the country changing legislation on medicinal cannabis recently. The company plans on growing medicinal cannabis there, as well as other tropical plant medicines, and will create around 12 jobs in the market.

James Linden, chairman of Greenlight Medicines, said it had also designed a clinical trial for a treatment for Covid-19 symptoms. The UK-based trial will look at a novel fungal extract to see if it can reduce the severity of Covid-19 symptoms.