RUA - Significant Headway Made with Trans-Tasman Partnership

Friday 7th October 2022

Rua Bioscience’s cultivation partnership with Australian-based Cann Group is making significant headway; the two companies achieving key milestones this week.

Rua Bioscience has exported its first seeds to Australia, in what is understood to be New Zealand’s first legal export of cannabis genetics under the medicinal cannabis scheme. The seeds will be grown by Cann Group and will be assessed for their commercial potential. A similar trial will be run at Rua’s cultivation R&D facility in Ruatorea.

Managing Director, Anna Stove, says “This an exciting moment for the company. This seed export demonstrates the value of our relationship with Cann Group as we further establish an end-to-end cultivation and supply chain solution at scale.

“It’s taking time, but we believe weaving the intergenerational plant knowledge of our team with the global cultivation scale of Cann Group will give us a significant competitive advantage. This small step demonstrates the potential of exporting unique East Coast genetics from Ruatorea to the world.”

Before their export, the seeds were blessed by Co-founder Panapa Ehau.

“Rua has been a careful kaitiaki of these seeds for some time. We have now transferred the responsibility for the care of some of that material to the team at Cann Group, who we know will also take that responsibility seriously,” he says.

Meanwhile, across the Tasman, Cann Group has announced that the GMP manufacturing licence for the Company’s flagship Mildura facility, which was issued by the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) on 30 June 2022, has been extended to cover the manufacture and release of finished dried flower products for patient use. This extends the facility’s previous capabilities beyond the manufacture of dried flower as an Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient (API) and hard capsule manufacturing.

Cann’s new AUD $120m cultivation and processing facility at Mildura is considered one of the largest and most advanced in Australasia. It is currently capable of producing 12,500 kilograms of dried cannabis flower per year. When complete, the capacity at the 13.5-hectare facility will grow up to 70,000 kilograms. In a capital-light strategy, Rua is leveraging this scale to deliver a range of medicinal cannabis products to multiple export markets.

Ends.

Significant Headway Made with Trans-Tasman Medicinal Cannabis Partnership

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