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Which country will emerge as R&D Hub for Cannabis Research?

Over the last two months, Anyone and everyone in India has been battered by the news of Sushant Singh Rajput's suicide and various people who might have aided it. Now the investigation have led towards consumption of various drugs including Cannabis. Simultaneously, a lot of research has been going on Cannabis and its impact on Corona Virus. All this led me to dig deeper and Identify which countries are Top R&D hubs for Cannabis Research?

Easiest trend identification was Patent Filing Data. Patent Filing in most of the technological aspects of Cannabis and related areas have seen an upward tick since 2014. Here is the broad summary

Technological Aspects of Cannabis 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019
Aspect of Delivery 30 50 70 110 134 18 6
Product Extensions 70 135 155 249 339 61 35
Cannabinoid 10 23 33 43 78 21 10
Cannabis Plant - Life Cycle Methods 12 20 19 32 53 18 7
Cannabis Extraction Process 7 16 17 45 47 7 5
Packaging 1 3 4 4 7 1 0
Sensory Identification Technology 19 16 19 23 38 4 1


As is clearly visible, Cannabis is being integrated in different product lines, innovation in areas such as Sensory Technologies, Onset, and Duration are also taking off — which are important from a product point of view. We also experience a plateauing trend in 2018 but it is more incidental than expected to rise again as with the legalization of Cannabis in different areas. In fact, I expect a rapid surge in the number of companies/academia filing patents especially with the enhanced focus on pharmaceutical sector in the aftermath of Covid. 

Key thing to note is that the ratio of the number of patent filings to the number of companies lies between 1-1.5 on average. This denotes that although these domains are not monopolized, however, these technological segments are crowded. That said since the aspects are still developing and not monopolized — Company A can grab the opportunity of capturing the whitespace. It's completely alien to other high-tech sectors like 5G where entire industry in monopolized by a few companies. 

Another way of analysing the same data is to undertake a country-wise analysis. Here is the summary of country-wise distribution of patent filing by cannabis companies


US, China, South Korea and UK are leading countries in filing patents for Cannabis. However, in general, a patent is first filed in the country from where the research is originated. Thereafter, a patent holder (company/inventor/academia) decides where else to protect the invention. Wherever a patent holder decides to protect, other than the root country, represents a potential market for the invention. 


So while US is by far the leader in undertaking the R&D on Cannabis and will be the most lucrative market too yet, certain countries such as Brazil and Australia will also be niche yet highly profitable market for Cannabis companies. 

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