Building pharmaceutical outsourcing partnerships

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In contrast, shares in Nemus Bioscience, the newest publicly traded cannabinoid company, have not caught on yet. And unlike its high-visibility competitors, which trade on the NASDAQ stock exchange, Costa Mesa, Calif.-based Nemus trades quietly on the less-prestigious over-the-counter market.
But Brian Murphy, Nemus’s CEO, is biding his time. Murphy sees his firm as an up-and-coming player in second-generation cannabinoids. Nemus has been raising modest amounts of money from investors in preferred stock offerings. And importantly, it has signed up a respected contract research and manufacturing organization, Albany Molecular Research Inc. (AMRI), to develop and produce the active ingredient in its lead product.
Nemus got its start in 2012 after one of its founders, Cosmas Lykos, was approached by investors looking to capitalize on growing interest in cannabinoids. It went public two years later via a reverse stock merger with a trucking company called Load Guard Logistics.
“As is apropos for the area of cannabinoids, we are a little unconventional in how we were founded,” Murphy acknowledges. Murphy himself has a pretty conventional background as chief medical officer for pharmaceutical firms including Valeant International, InterMune, and Roche.
Nemus’s ace in the hole is a partnership with the University of Mississippi (UM), which since 1968 has held the sole federal contract to cultivate cannabis for research purposes. One of Nemus’s scientific advisers is Mahmoud A. ElSohly, director of UM’s marijuana project. “He literally wrote the book on cannabinoid chemistry,” Murphy says.

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