Kevin McKernan was leading Life Technologies Corp. (LIFE)’s Ion Torrent DNA-sequencing research when a new business opportunity caught his eye: marijuana. 
 
 A year later, McKernan, 38, has quit his job, formed a startup run from his house in Marblehead, Massachusetts, and announced today that the company had sequenced the entire genome of the cannabis plant. 
 
 The project, which cost about $200,000, may lead to the development of treatments for cancer, pain and inflammatory diseases, he said. McKernan’s company, Medicinal Genomics, is making the data public using Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN)’s EC2 cloud- computing system. McKernan called the work a “draft assembly,” and it hasn’t yet been published in a peer-reviewed academic journal. 
 
 “This is the beginning of a more scientific approach to the genetics of the species,” Richard Gibbs, director of the Human Genome Sequencing Center at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, said in a telephone interview yesterday. “This is not really about marijuana; it’s about pharmacology.” 
 
 An important step to find a species’ potential utility is to map its DNA, the building block of life, according to Gibbs, who said he has known McKernan for more than 15 years. 
 
 McKernan worked on the Human Genome Project from 1996 to 2000, and started a commercial laboratory with his two brothers called Agencourt Bioscience, which was sold to Beckman Coulter Inc. in 2005. A spin-out of Agencourt that made sequencing technology, called Agencourt Personal Genomics, was acquired by Applied Biosystems Inc., which combined with Invitrogen Corp. in 2008 to become Carlsbad, California-based Life Technologies. Life Technologies bought Ion Torrent last year for $375 million in cash and stock. 
 
 Open Access 
 
 McKernan said his company’s goal is to allow researchers to find ways to maximize the cannabis plant’s therapeutic benefits and minimize its psychoactive effects. 
 
 “These pathways can be optimized in the plant or cloned into other hosts for more efficient biologic production,” Medicinal Genomics said in a statement. “It may be possible through genome directed breeding to attenuate the psychoactive effects of cannabis, while enhancing the medicinal aspects.” 
 
 The plant makes chemical compounds called cannabinoids, a class that includes tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the main psychoactive substance in marijuana. Another such compound called cannabidiol, or CBD, has shown promise in shrinking tumors in rats without the psychoactive effects, McKernan said. 
 
 Medical Uses 
 
 “That one has been predominantly bred out of the plant as it’s been bred for recreational use,” he said. His company’s business model is to develop assays to enable regulators, government agencies or pharmaceutical companies to research cannabis’s gene pathways. 
 
 Donald Abrams, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, who has done research into medical cannabis since 1997, said scientists have been able to study the plant without knowing the genome. 
 
 “We know what the active ingredients of the plant are already,” Abrams, chief of oncology at San Francisco General Hospital, said in a telephone interview. “You don’t need the genome; you need the plant.” 
 
 Companies such as GW Pharmaceuticals Plc (GWP), based in Salisbury, England, have developed cannabis-based medicines. GW sells Sativex for muscle spasms related to multiple sclerosis, using THC and CBD. 
 
 McKernan said he was initially convinced to pursue the research after seeing papers published in academic journals including Nature on the plant’s tumor-shrinking effects in rats. 
 
 “One in three people are going to get cancer, and one in four are going to die with it or from it,” he said. “So any compound, as preliminary as this may be, that’s nontoxic and shows hope there, we should be all over. 
 
 “The only way I knew how to do that was to sequence the genome.” 
 
 To contact the reporter on this story: Meg Tirrell in New York at mtirrell@bloomberg.net. 
 
 To contact the editor responsible for this story: Reg Gale at rgale5@bloomberg.net. ||||| At last, the field of genomics has something to offer Cheech and Chong. DNA sequencing hit a new high last night with the midnight release of the Cannabis sativa genome. The raw sequence was posted on Amazon’s EC2 public cloud computing service by a young company called Medicinal Genomics, which aims to explore the genomes of therapeutic plants. 
 
 Thus far the company is only posting the raw sequence reads – meaning that the over 131 billion bases of shotgun sequence have not yet undergone the important and arduous process of being assembled into contiguous chunks. For now, the sequence is fragmented into hundreds of thousands of snippets. But Medicinal Genomics founder Kevin McKernan says he estimates the size of the C. sativa genome to be about 400 million bases – roughly three times the genome of that other weed, the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. 
 
 And in case you’re wondering: the DNA was extracted and prepped for sequencing in a laboratory in Amsterdam. 
 
 McKernan says he was turned on to the idea of sequencing cannabis by a 2003 publication in Nature Reviews Cancer about the many potential uses – including fighting cancer – of cannabinoids. C. sativa makes about sixty of the compounds. Although THC has gotten the most attention, McKernan hopes his company’s data will help scientists explore a few of the others, and perhaps guide plant breeding programs to generate new Cannabis strains. 
 
 No word yet on whether the information can also help researchers construct a van made out of marijuana, but chances are that some enthusiast out there will look into that possibility if the company follows through on its pledge to make genome annotations available as an iPad app next fall. 
 
 
 
 Also appealing to McKernan: the growing medical marijuana market, which he says is swelling by over 50% a year. “It’s going to have to be a fairly regulated market,” he says, “and regulation is going to come through genetics and fingerprinting of which strains are approved.” 
 
 McKernan’s name may ring a bell for sequencing buffs. In 2000, he cofounded Agencourt Biosciences, a spinoff of which eventually created the technology underlying the popular SOLiD sequencing platform now sold by Life Technologies. 
 
 McKernan dipped into his own bank account to launch Medicinal Genomics, and says he also has funding from the network of angel investors – mostly friends and family – that helped him get Agencourt off the ground in 2000. 
 
 Image: warrantedarrest, Flickr, creative commons. ||||| THC, or tetrahydrocannabinol, is the chemical responsible for most of marijuana's psychological effects. It acts much like the cannabinoid chemicals made naturally by the body, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). 
 
 Cannabinoid receptors are concentrated in certain areas of the brain associated with thinking, memory, pleasure, coordination and time perception. THC attaches to these receptors and activates them and affects a person's memory, pleasure, movements, thinking, concentration, coordination, and sensory and time perception, according to NIDA. 
 
 THC is one of many compounds found in the resin secreted by glands of the marijuana plant. More of these glands are found around the reproductive organs of the plant than on any other area of the plant. Other compounds unique to marijuana, called cannabinoids, are present in this resin. One cannabinoid, CBD is nonpsychoactive, according to the National Center for Biotechnology Information, and actually blocks the high associated with THC. 
 
 THC stimulates cells in the brain to release dopamine, creating euphoria, according to NIDA. It also interferes with how information is processed in the hippocampus, which is part of the brain responsible for forming new memories. 
 
 THC can induce hallucinations, change thinking and cause delusions. On average, the effects last about two hours, and kick in 10 to 30 minutes after ingestion. Psychomotor impairment may continue after the perceived high has stopped, however. 
 
 "In some cases, reported side effects of THC include elation, anxiety, tachycardia, short-term memory recall issues, sedation, relaxation, pain-relief and many more," said A.J. Fabrizio, a marijuana chemistry expert at Terra Tech Corp, a California agricultural company focused on local farming and medical cannabis. However, he said, a study in the British Journal of Pharmacology found that other types of cannabinoids, as well as terpenes (compounds that produce flavor and fragrance in plants), can modulate and reduce negative effects. 
 
 The effects of marijuana make it a popular drug. In fact, it is considered one of the most commonly used illicit drugs in the world. But these effects also concern mental health advocates. THC can trigger a relapse in schizophrenic symptoms, according to NIDA. 
 
 Another possible risk of consuming THC comes in the form of impaired motor skills. Marijuana may impair driving or similar tasks for approximately three hours after consumption and it is the second-most common psychoactive substance found in drivers, after alcohol, reports the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. People taking medical marijuana are instructed not to drive until it has been established that they can tolerate it and conduct motor tasks successfully. 
 
 The use of marijuana may cause problems for younger people, and long-term problems. "Some of the side effects of THC include a decrease in IQ, memory and cognition, especially in younger people," said Dr. Damon Raskin, medical director at Cliffside Malibu Treatment Center. "However, the jury is still out on long-term effects, as not enough research has been done on it yet. There is some speculation that it could impair fertility in men and women and also compromise a person's airways, but the studies are still not clear." 
 
 A study by the University of Montreal published in the journal Development and Psychopathology in 2016 found that early use of marijuana can affect teens. Smokers that start around age 14 do worse on some cognitive tests than non-smokers. The study on almost 300 students found that pot smokers also have a higher school dropout rate. Those that waited to start around age 17 did not seem to have the same impairments. 
 
 NIDA reports that rats exposed to THC before birth, soon after birth or during adolescence have shown problems with specific learning and memory tasks later in life. 
 
 The drug can also have drug interactions with certain medications. 
 
 According to the National Cancer Institute, marijuana has been used for medicinal purposes for more than 3,000 years. As of early 2017, more than half of the United States has legalized the use of medicinal marijuana. Several states have also legalized the drug for recreational use, as well. 
 
 THC can be extracted from marijuana, or synthesized, as is the case for the FDA-approved drug dronabinol. Dronabinol is used to treat or prevent the nausea and vomiting associated with cancer medicines and to increase the appetites of people with AIDS, according to the U.S. National Library of Medicine. It is a light yellow resinous oil. 
 
 Other studies are showing more evidence that, when used properly, THC has many additional medical benefits. For example, THC may be able to improve memory when taken in small doses, according to a 2016 study on mice. 
 
 People tout marijuana as a better drug than prescription pills because it is "all-natural." That may not be true. "Just because something is considered 'natural' doesn't mean it's healthy," Raskin said. "For example, poison oak can be harmful. Just because it grows in the ground doesn't mean it's good for you or healthy." 
 
 Edibles, foods containing THC, have become a large problem in states that have legalized pot because of overdosing. 
 
 "Edibles can lead to overdose sometimes because people often ingest a full serving of a cookie instead of a diagnosed smaller amount," Raskin said. "I mean, who eats a half a cookie? It is easier to swallow a cookie and it's very attractive to younger people or those who don't want to inhale it in a smoke form." 
 
 Raskin also explained that edibles are extremely high in potency, and when ingested in the gastrointestinal tract, the drug can last longer and with greater intensity. "The effect from inhaling THC will last 45 minutes to a few hours, but edibles can last for six to eight hours and are more likely to lead to a trip to the ER with an overdose," he said. 
 
 When THC is exposed to air, it degrades into cannabinol, a cannabinoid that has its own psychological effects. THC concentration also depends on the cultivation of the marijuana plant, known scientifically as Cannabis sativa L. 
 
 A type of cannabis that has a minimal amount of THC, as low as 0.5 percent, is hemp, according to the North American Industrial Hemp Council. Hemp is used for industrial and medical purposes. 
 
 Some strains of cannabis can have as little as 0.3 percent THC by weight. In other strains, THC makes up 20 percent of the weight in a sample. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reports that the average THC concentration in marijuana is 1 to 5 percent; in hashish, it is 5 to 15 percent, and in hashish oil, it averages 20 percent. THC in recreational doses of marijuana is highly variable and the lower the THC content in the marijuana, the more the user must consume to produce the desired effects. 
 
 Additional reporting by contributing writers Jessie Szalay and Lauren Cox. 
 
 Additional resources
– Marijuana is giving up its secrets: A Massachusetts company has sequenced the entire genome of the cannabis plant for the first time, reports the Nature news blog. The results from Medicinal Genomics have yet to be peer-reviewed and probably won't be published in full until next year. And the company has only the best of intentions, notes Bloomberg: “It may be possible through genome directed breeding to attenuate the psychoactive effects of cannabis, while enhancing the medicinal aspects.” In other words: Make medical marijuana more "medical" and less "marijuana." That's not to say others couldn't take the information and do the reverse. As the PopSci blog notes, the discovery eventually could have "significant implications for both the medical and recreational users of the drug" by allowing particular genes to be "isolated and concentrated." The company promises to make genome annotations available via iPhone app next fall.