Chris Bunka, Chairman & CEO, Lexaria

The cannabis industry is growing by leaps and bounds making it one of the fastest-growing industries. Today, marijuana is being reevaluated on a cultural and legal level in many countries after being considered an illegal substance for decades.

Currently, NSAIDs such as Ibuprofen and Aspirin kill more than 16,000 people per year in the US. NSAIDs are considered relatively safe compared to opioids and other drug classes. Lexaria, a global leader in enhancing the speed and efficiency of difficult-to-deliver fat-solvable active molecules and drugs, strives to help keep people alive. Chris Bunka, Chairman and CEO of the company states, “Whether they are smokers either addicted to nicotine or just enjoying nicotine: death from lung disease seems too high a price to pay.” Since 2014 the company has been developing its DehydraTECH™ technology, and has strengthened and broadened the technology to an unprecedented degree, including for both oral nicotine and for NSAIDs.

Lexaria’s technology is designed to deliver many drugs safely, generally at lower dose levels, in part to lower unwanted side effects. “It’s an incredibly challenging journey when your technology is revolutionary: Lexaria’s DehydraTECH™ is not an evolution – it is a revolution and it is disruptive enough that we could cut some drug company’s revenues by 50%!”, says Chris. Lexaria has done more to advance drug delivery technology in 5 years than most of the pharma industry has done in 20 years, making many established companies less than enamored. Ironically Lexaria’s technology was originally developed to more effectively deliver CBD in brewed tea! It was the company’s first, original, patent award.

DehydraTECH: Lexaria’s Industry-Leading Technology

Lexaria Bioscience Corp.’s proprietary drug delivery technology, DehydraTECH™, improves the way active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) enter the bloodstream by promoting healthier oral ingestion methods and increasing the effectiveness of fat-soluble active molecules, thereby lowering overall dosing. The Company’s technology can be applied to many different ingestible product formats, including foods, beverages, oral suspensions, tablets, and capsules.

“In a human clinical study we performed and was published in 2019 in a peer-reviewed medical journal, we evidenced that DehydraTECH delivers 317% more CBD into human bloodstream just 30 minutes after swallowing capsules than the same dose of generic CBD. This is exactly the kind of performance we are accustomed to at Lexaria,” substantiates Chris. That same human clinical study evidenced that DehydraTECH CBD lowered blood pressure, leading to three human clinical studies underway for 2021 evaluating the possibility of utilizing patented DehydraTECH CBD as a potential treatment for hypertension.

Many drugs take an hour or two before the medication gets to work. On the other hand, DehydraTECH has been demonstrated to reduce the delivery time to the bloodstream in just minutes. The technology is not only capable of delivering drugs into the bloodstream immediately; some drugs are even delivered more effectively across the blood-brain barrier. This is of huge importance for the drugs where the receptor cells are located in the brain making the drug less effective unless there is a method of delivery to the brain-located receptor cells.

This applies to nicotine, where over 90% of human receptor cells are located in the brain, as well as for CB1 receptor cells – one of the primary receptor cells for cannabinoids – that is also located within the brain. Lexaria’s technology is one of the very few drug technologies that are proficient in delivering drugs across the BBB.

Lexaria does not manufacture any drugs. It licenses its technology to market leaders to utilize in its product categories. The company receives fees including licensing and royalty fees. Because its revenues include licensing and royalty fees, they are are of extremely high quality as the company does not incur any manufacturing or distribution costs.

Taking cannabinoids orally without the traditional multi-hour wait-time for effectiveness is not only fast acting; it also exits the body faster.

Chris says, “We generally consider DehydraTECH to be Fast-On, Fast-Off. But it has even more versatility and we can customize our processing techniques to allow for faster onset or, for certain applications like pain relief, a steadier drug release over hours. DehydraTECH’s versatility is truly astounding.”

Carving a Niche in the Market

Two executives of Lexaria have children who grew up with seizure disorders and know first-hand that some of the medications more commonly available to treat pediatric seizures seem nearly barbaric today. They looked to find a better way to treat patients, and since they couldn’t find a better way, they invented it instead.

Many cannabis companies evolved with the solitary goal of being capable of getting people high whereas some drug companies seemed to focus almost entirely on profits. Lexaria wanted to find a better way.

Lexaria’s technology stands out in the market by encouraging people to use lower dosages of drugs, in a way that is less likely to harm them. This simple goal of the company drives everything they do at Lexaria. Instead of smoking a cigarette, the company encourages people to use a purified nicotine oral product that will not deliver lung cancer and emphysema.

“Our technology will let you do that, TODAY! Think of the lives that could be saved if we could place a small 1 mg dose of nicotine into a coffee pod and sell that as an alternative to cigarettes. Not to mention the improvements in corporate efficiency with smoke breaks becoming a thing of the past! Our basic goal is simple: keep people alive and do so with the fewest side effects,” elaborates Chris. 

While constantly evolving and improving, Lexaria aims to create a second-generation version of DehydraTECH released later in 2021 or early 2022. By offloading some of their own R&D costs, Lexaria takes some of the costs of technology development and improvement away from its clients. When the company releases new technology improvements, the clients receive those improvements as part of their royalty agreements. Hence, it is always working towards the latest and best performance thresholds on behalf of the end-users. It achieves this by listening to the corporate clients and meeting their needs through technological development. 

Future Roadmap

“We are here to change the world and make it a better place for humanity. Safer drug use through lower drug quantities and more responsive performance are a win-win. We think, if DehydraTECH was adopted by just a couple of the world’s larger drug, pharma, or CPG companies, it could generate hundreds of millions of dollars in annual royalty payments to Lexaria,” says Chris. The company intends to re-invest part of the money into more ground-breaking R&D to develop an improved version of its technology, always intending to help consumers lead lives with reduced risk of negative side effects.  

Lexaria aims to see DehydraTECH become the world’s #1 drug delivery technology.