“We’ve got three stages to the business. We’ve been doing the first stage for the last five years, which is cultivation,” Reece told the Herald.
“We’re in the process of building out our processing and manufacturing facility, and then the third stage is clinical trials and and product launches and things like that.”
The manufacturing facility, along with cultivation, is in the North Waikato.
The industry has had a mixed bag of fortunes locally, with several companies entering liquidation or receivership in the past year.
It has also struggled to win over some doctors, with queries raised about efficacy and the rigour of the sector’s research and clinical trials.
Reece said she understood why some clinicians were sceptical, and aimed to change that with better research.
“We see medicinal cannabis as cannabinoid compounds that can be used to manufacture and create formulations that help to manage different conditions.
“We don’t have enough data, we don’t have enough information. So what we really want to do with clinical trials is to actually take some of these formulations we’ve created and put that data behind it, and be able to show that this formulation for this condition can help to manage the symptoms.”
She said Ora Pharm would attend the world’s largest cannabis expo in Berlin and the Cannabis Europa Conference in London.
She said manufacturer Blue Lab, specialist contract grower Puro and Te Tairāwhiti pharmaceutical company Rua would also be on the trade mission.
Reece said it was crucial to recognise medicinal cannabis products were not a panacea.
“We’re not selling snake oil. What we’re doing is [managing] symptoms associated with different conditions.”
And she said markets in Europe were substantial, with Germany’s cannabis consumer sector alone worth US$866 million ($1.43 billion) last year.
“They were one of the early adopters.”
Reece said the New Zealand market was also growing.
“The way that the New Zealand market reports is around the number of prescriptions. And the prescriptions can have more than one product ... so it’s not super clear, but what you can see is the number of prescriptions year-on-year have dramatically increased.”
She said prescriptions had risen from 2336 in 2018 to 305,304 last year.
Reece said New Zealand had room to grow exports of cannabis flower and its extracts.
She said once Ora Pharm’s processing and manufacturing facilities were operational, hopefully by year’s end, flower, oil and extracted products should be exported.
Ora Pharm helped navigate regulatory and export burdens for growers, Reece said.
“We have contracted cultivators. And then we’re also looking this summer to launch a trial programme on having satellite growers and that’s where we’ll help them to get their licence and streamline that process, and support them in their growing and SOPs [Standard Operating Procedures].”
Reece said Ora Pharm currently had a dozen employees and hoped to have 20 to 25 employees by next year.
A civil structural engineer, Reece said she entered the cannabis sector during a trip overseas with her husband Karl in 2017.
During the round-the-world journey, the couple landed in Boston, Massachusetts.
“He was offered a job and so he stayed and I ended up taking a job at a cannabis start-up over in Boston. And at the time they had 16 facilities in six states. I helped them grow. I was in charge of the design, construction and making operational all of their facilities.”
She said the NZTE mission indicated a good level of public sector support for the industry and she believed there was multi-party political support for increased medicinal cannabis exports.
John Weekes is a business journalist mostly covering aviation and court. You can read his previous story on medicinal cannabis, Up in Smoke: Why New Zealand’s medical cannabis industry is struggling to make ends meet.
