Opportunity

The term ‘botanical drug’ is used in the United States to denote natural products or drugs manufactured with plant substances, including algae and microfungi. Europe uses the term herbal medicinal product (HMP) to refer to all drugs that include one or more herbal substances in their composition. Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is the term that broadly covers the materials prescribed in the historical context of their traditional herbal medical practices.

The raw materials for all of these form part of the pharmaceutical agriculture market that also includes plant based medical supplies, supplements, and functional foods for health, etc. This total global pharmaceutical agriculture market is currently one trillion ($1,000,000,000,000) dollars annually and is growing at an eight to ten percent cumulative annual growth rate (CAGR). This market has no overlap with the crop agriculture market and represents entirely different market drivers.

Solution

Our Spectrix™ technology components (lights, sensors and controls) assesses the internal growth controls all plants have for adapting or responding to environmental changes during growth and uses a signaling mechanism to instruct the plant to alter growth controls to achieve desired results. This signaling mechanism in our lights responds to stimulus “signatures” in plants by changing the internal growth instructions, just as it would in nature, but with less interference in the instructions. By providing a managed environment that matches the “signature” provided to the plants, the plants respond using their own internal metabolic responses.

Impact

  • Increase Health Security
  • High Potency Medicinals
  • Reduce Carbon Footprint of Agriculture

Symbiotic Systems’ demonstrated solution will enable mass production of pharmaceutical grade medicinal plants and herbs in locations closer to production facilities and in regions with fewer supply chain interruptions. Until 1990 ninety (90%) percent of the pharmaceutical agriculture supply chain producing active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) were found in the United States, Europe, and Japan. It is now estimated that China and India currently produce 75% to 80% of all global API supply and China produces 40% by itself.

Symbiotic Systems has demonstrated the ability to stimulate record levels of specific API production in source plants. Symbiotic Systems demonstrated, with non-GMO and generally available hemp plants, a Beta-caryophyllene specific production 500% higher than the plant’s normal production.

Our technology also decreases the energy costs of growing pharmaceutical grade plants and herbs indoors significantly, by using proprietary targeted signaling, while at the same time increasing plant output by 300% to 500% using normal seeds. This is an effective reduction of growing costs by three to five times while producing record levels of pharmaceutical raw materials. The technology has also shown reduction in total time to harvest in several crop species by up to 20%.