Review: Emerald Conference San Diego: Where Investors Meet Innovators

LOS ANGELES- Sunny San Diego was the site for the The Emerald Conference, an event which focuses on the science of cannabis. Now in its 7th year, the deep depth of thinking on cannabis science provided a welcome respite from the torrent of awful & tragic news from Ukraine.

MJBiz bought the conference in early 2020, making it the longest-running interdisciplinary cannabis scientific event. Analytical testing, extraction science, research and development, cultivation science, formulations, and pre-clinical research are among the topics covered throughout the two-day conference.

Investors were there too at the event & also at the invite-only CannaPac parties in the evenings hosted by R.W. Navis.  The investors were mostly there to take a “peek under the sheets” at some of the exciting emerging research & innovations being uncovered. Essentially, investors were there to meet the innovators in the market.

Innovations that only truly come from the commercialization & application of the science of cannabis.

According to the organizers, The Emerald Conference is a truly one-of-a-kind, intimate, focused, and enjoyable gathering for the cannabis science community, which is one of the main reasons the team at MJBizCon bought the event in 2020. 

I spoke to one of the speakers, Dr. Markus Roggen of Delic Labs. Delic Labs is a licensed cannabis and psilocybin research laboratory focused on extraction optimization, analytical testing, and process development. Founded by Dr. Markus Roggen and UBC Professor Glenn Sammis, Delic Labs uses precision chemical analytics and metabolomics identification to advance the cannabis and psilocybin industries.

Aside from the great content, according to Dr. Roggen, this year’s conference was a success just by bringing together canabis’s scientific community. A community that hasn’t met in almost two years due to Covid. Dr. Roggen felt it was a crucial event for networking again within the science area in cannabis.

Highlights from the conference included highly accessible talks from Mara Gordon & Professor Jeff Chen.

Jeff was an early pioneer of cannabis science while on the faculty at UCLA.  Jeff recently left academia to start up his new company Radicle Science.  Mara Gordon was the only woman out of 18 male scientist-speakers.  Weeks before the event, Mara had called out the organizers on a post on LinkedIn for their lack of female scientists speakers (there are, in fact, many female cannabis scientists).

According to Mara, her post got over 25,000 views on LinkedIn. The organizers subsequently bent over backwards to apologize to Mara.  Mara is the CEO of Aunt Zelda’s—a leading medical cannabis group.  Some remarked Mara’s super-insightful commentary was probably worth five of the other male scientists’ commentary.

The keynote was from Dr. Daniele Piomelli from the University of California Irvine.

With only a 3 or 4 of the over 150 known Cannabinoids fully commercialized, we still have a long way to go—before we truly unlock the vast commercial potential of cannabis. 

Image: Loews Hotel Coronado.