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This is the Leap Together podcast, where we highlight top leaders driving breakthroughs in clinical research and life sciences.
My greatest good for the next five years of time was building a great company in Charlotte's Web and supplying a great product to the people that were using it. So that's what we did. And the team that's come around AJNA, I couldn't have, you know, such a an all star roster in drug development and chemists, if not for the story of Charlotte Figg and the credibility we have from building Charlotte's Web.
Zach:Hi, Zach Gobst here. I'm the host of Leap Together podcast. I talk with leaders in clinical trials, pharmaceuticals, and patient advocacy to explore what goes into medical breakthroughs and how we improve our health care. This episode is brought to you by Leapcure, the leader in patient engagement and recruitment for clinical trials. Leapcure accelerates research while transforming patient advocacy.
Zach:After hundreds of studies, millions of patients across more than 50 countries, Leapcure has been used to contribute an average participation of 62% to research. Visit leapcure.com to learn more. Today, we're really fortunate to be, joined by Joel Stanley, former CEO and Chairman of Charlotte's Web, and now a board member of DeFloria. He leads AJNA Biosciences and developing next generation botanical therapeutics. As one of the eldest of the Stanley brothers credited with pioneering Charlotte's Web CBD products and featured in outlets such as CNN, Forbes, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, Joel is bringing the legacy and impact of Charlotte's Web full circle At AJNA, his vision is to expand access to pharmaceutical grade botanical psychedelics designed to address mental health and neurological disorders.
Zach:Joel, thanks for being on the show.
Joel:Yeah, thanks for having me, Zach.
Zach:So first question I have is how did you get started with all this? Where did this all start?
Joel:Yeah, so, you know, you mentioned Charlotte's Web, my brothers and I founded Charlotte's Web, and Charlotte's Web was really, really the first company and kind of the tip of the spear, the starting gun for the entire CBD industry. And it was everything we learned there that really built the passions we have today for what we're doing with this new company, AJNA Biosciences. And to put it in the quickest nutshell that I can, some people are familiar with the story of Charlotte's Web, some people are not, but my brothers and I developing really some of the first high quality, highly tested standardized cannabis extracts in what was the medical marijuana industry starting back in 2008 for us, just in Colorado. And we had been developing products, and we were very different than everyone on the market. We weren't just about selling flour that could be smoked or, you know, edibles, brownies, pot brownies, things like that, we were very different.
Joel:We were very focused on the medical side, and we've always seen the cannabis plant as just highly medicinal. And we've seen really incredible things having been in the industry now for really coming up on two decades. But in 2012, we met a five year old named Charlotte Figgy whose parents were searching for a medical option. Charlotte had a very rare form of epilepsy. She had three hundred to four hundred very violent grand mal seizures every week, and there were no FDA approved drugs for Charlotte at her age at that time.
Joel:So her parents, you know, most of the drugs that they had tried, experimental drugs, some of them were very catastrophic for her, but none of them solved her problems with seizures. Her mom, Paige Figgy, found a paper from 1980 showing this little known, at the time, known cannabinoid called CBD, cannabidiol, and it was in small patient population study out of University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, and it showed that this rare cannabinoid CBD could potentially help with muscle spasms as well as epileptic fits. So I'm seeing as they had no options, she started looking, she lived in Colorado, they started looking at the medical cannabis industry. And after a little while searching, she found us. She was looking for this cannabidiol, what everyone knows as CBD.
Joel:And back then, very few people could pronounce the word cannabidiol. You know, the industry hadn't exploded. So, she found us and we were one of the very few people developing CBD, high high CBD strains. Charlotte's doctors had, you know, no other options. So, they signed off for her to try it.
Joel:We made an a a plant extract for her, high in CBD, very low in THC, and the results were amazing. In fact, they were so amazing that CNN's Sanjay Gupta picked up Charlotte's story, made a couple of full length documentaries on Charlotte's life, as well as really thousands of other children using what would become Charlotte's Web, the product. So it was in that story we got to see really incredible things. It was the first time that we saw, and I would say the world saw a standardized plant extract surpassing the efficacy of multiple FDA approved drugs for many different indications. Thousands of people are still using products like Charlotte's Web because they have no other options.
Joel:So, you know, having been through that, what we realized is that, you know, Charlotte's Web and the entire hemp CBD industry really exists under the regulatory framework of dietary supplement. And that's a problem because when you have a highly efficacious medicine, if it's a dietary supplement, then basically there's no research around it, insurance can't cover it. And the dietary supplement industry, honestly, is quite scandalous. It's it's very it's almost not regulated at all, so you never really know what you're gonna get. So we built a great company in Charlotte's Web, great product, but it existed in an industry that just couldn't reach the people that could really be helped by the product.
Joel:So we learned our lesson. We took Charlotte's Web public in 2018, and I stepped off the board of Charlotte's Web in 2021 to start this company, AJNA Biosciences. And it's really to take those botanicals that we know work, that we know are safe, standardize them into a repeatable result, something you can't get from dietary supplements, and then move them through the FDA clinical trial process so that they can be approved as drugs and ultimately, hopefully covered by insurance for a lot of the people that really need them. So that was really where the mission was born from, and AJNA Biosciences doesn't just focus on cannabinoids, we also have some tryptamine, psilocybin in our pipeline, but it's not just, you know, it seems like we're just studying right now formerly prohibited substances. It's not just about that.
Joel:It just so happens that cannabis and psilocybin mushrooms happen to be some of the lowest hanging fruit in nature. We know that they work really well for certain things, and we also have fantastic safety data on them. So they make a lot of sense to move through as some of the world's first botanical drugs. And I will say there's only four FDA approved botanical drugs. The regulatory pathway is brand new.
Joel:So all the drugs we've been taking are synthetic single molecule drugs. It's really only in the last one hundred years that humans have ingested highly concentrated single compounds. And that comes with a lot of side effects. I don't wanna say that it's bad. I think we have some great drugs through our Western medical system, but we completely left these full spectrum botanicals behind, and that was a bad idea.
Joel:So AJNA is built to bring all that we know works from nature. Some some of these plants have thousands of years of recorded use, efficacious use, but we banned them in the last hundred years from being medicine. So we're going back to those that we know work, combining it with modern laboratory science to move it through the FDA process to become botanical drugs.
Zach:Yeah, super fascinating. Curious, what kind of drives you to move beyond what you've done with Charlotte's Web to, you know, essentially like in botanical medicine, and, you know, take on the endeavor of AJNA? You went through, you know, taking a company public to kind of go even further, to push further. You know, where do you think that comes from? Because that's a pretty incredible endeavor.
Joel:And thanks for seeing it. It is, you know, we're really one of a kind, the four FDA approved botanical drugs to date, three of those are topical, which are very different approval process, would say, different clinical trial processes, similar but different. So really, our drug number one in the pipeline is moving into phase two clinical trials. As far as we know, it is the first oral systemic, so what we think of really pharmaceutical, not a topical cream, first oral systemic botanical drug to move into a phase two clinical trial. So it'll probably be the first oral systemic botanical drug approved.
Joel:So it is pioneering. It is hard. And we can get into that. I'm sure we'll talk about it, you know, why it's so hard. But why we picked up this torch?
Joel:Honestly, it's because having built Charlotte's Web, we built a fantastic product. It is an amazing, you know, it's one of the most standardized dietary supplements or plant supplements you can find out there, not just within CBD or hemp, but I would argue within all of dietary supplements. We went to great lengths to build an infrastructure to create a really reproducible experience for people, but only a fraction of people who could benefit from that CBD product are actually using it. And the main reason why, if I could distill it into a couple of words, it would be physician advocacy. Physicians can't legally prescribe a dietary supplement.
Joel:They can't legally prescribe anything but an FDA approved drug, and insurance doesn't cover anything but an FDA approved drug. So AJNA is kind of a chapter two, but really it's about access. The main reason why is because we know that there are thousands and thousands, if not millions of people that can benefit from a from a product like Charlotte's Web, but they'll never hear about it. It'll never be, you know, recommended by their physicians if it doesn't go through the FDA clinical trial process, which again is very hard, but it's very worthy. You have to understand the CBD industry popped up overnight.
Joel:After San Jacopta told our story, Charlotte Figgy's story, we started to see hundreds of brands pop up on Amazon and eBay selling CBD. Well, back then, this is is back in 2012 and 2013, back then, the supply, right, you would have to have fields of high CBD hemp growing, right, which there was only a couple of high CBD hemp strains. Ours was really one of the first. So you had to have supply chain for all of those products to pop up. We had a 15,000 person waiting list in families moving to Colorado because hemp wasn't legal in The US yet, but a 15,000 person waiting list.
Joel:And for us, being the leaders of the category, the first people growing in open field in The US, hemp, high CBD hemp, we couldn't we couldn't make enough product to satisfy just 15,000 people. But all of these brands from other supplement companies, they're kind of the usual suspects. They've done it in other industries. When Echinacea's popular, Acai was popular, Omegas are popular. You never know you're getting the product.
Joel:This was a problem. So we had all these brands pop up, and we knew that it was impossible for them to even contain the ingredient CBD because no one was growing it. There was no supply. The milligrams on planet earth did not exist yet. So we had to watch that.
Joel:That was very painful. I had families reach out and say, hey, good news. You can take us off your waiting list because we found another product. And, you know, CBD is not CBD is not CBD. Cannabis is not cannabis is not cannabis.
Joel:How you make it, which strain you use. Right? There's so much that goes into creating a consistent product. Well, in the beginning, there was nothing in it anyway. So consequently, thousands of people thought they tried CBD but tried a fake product, and that was very discouraging, painful to watch.
Joel:But I learned a lot about American business and the dietary supplement industry, and what to watch for there. So this next step is about moving a product that we've seen do profound things for many, many people into a place where all the people who haven't heard of it, maybe even people that thought that they've tried it, now their physicians have access to it with clinical data, safety data, dosing data, so that those families that could benefit will actually get access. So Charlotte's Web, I'll say one more thing on this. This is very telling. Sanjag Gupta told the story of Charlotte Faggi and Stanley Brothers in August 2013.
Joel:Right? A pure CBD product in October 2013 out of Europe, called Epidiolex, went into its first clinical trials right after Charlotte's story was told. Now these are very different products. One is a full spectrum extract with lots of different cannabinoids. One a pure CBD.
Joel:That pure CBD product was approved in summer twenty eighteen, so five years after Charlotte's Web started being commercialized. Charlotte's Web is still the most recognizable brand within cannabis worldwide. But today, Charlotte's Web is a dietary supplement company. Now this is sales, but it says a lot about access. As a dietary supplement company, Charlotte's Web, the biggest brand, multiple SKUs, the best gummies on the market, the best tinctures on the market.
Joel:It does around 60,000,000 annual revenue. And it had a five year head start on Epidiolex that that was approved in 2018, and Epidiolex now does over a billion dollars annual, and it was only approved for less than 125,000 people. So that physician advocacy through an FDA approval process expands not only the economics for it, sure, that's wonderful, but it actually expands access for people.
Zach:Now you mentioned physician advocacy. I'd love to kind of build on that. You know, I think what you're describing is, you you have a categorically different product, and Charlotte's Web had challenges because of the way that things are regulated and in kind of explaining and educating the consumer. What role does physician advocacy play for what you're doing with AJNA and overall with kind of what you're seeking out to do?
Joel:Yeah, you know, I think, you know, anytime any one of us get diagnosed with a disorder, with a disease, we're, you know, the vast majority of us listen to our doctor and our doctor can only legally prescribe, send us to Walgreens, CVS for something that's been FDA approved. And that's really what physician advocacy means to me is that physicians only have in their toolkit for any given disorder that which is FDA approved and listed. And physicians can look at the clinical trial data, decide whether or not this drug or that drug is the right option for us to try. And without going through this process, they don't even have access to these full spectrum cannabinoid products or any other botanical drug for that matter in that toolkit. So they can't legally advocate for it.
Joel:Now physicians can, you know, if they think vitamin C might help someone, they're vitamin C deficient, they can recommend vitamin C. They can recommend anything, but they can't legally prescribe it and insurance won't cover it. So it's really an advocacy of the entire medical system, including the payer systems, Medicare, Medicaid, insurance. And right now, we don't have any of these botanical drugs or options with clinical data standardized to pharmaceutical grade so that experience is a repeatable experience. We don't have that.
Joel:So that's really the gap we're filling with AJNA.
Zach:I have one more question around like your transition from Charlotte's Web to what you're doing with AJNA, of, you know, vision setting in creating this roadmap, you have these years of experiences and success with what you've built with Charlotte's Web. Curious about what your process was for creating the new vision for AJNA and building a team to rally around that vision. That's your second foray, so you've, or I don't know, I guess you've had others as well, but building off of your previous experience, curious what that process was like for you.
Joel:Yeah, so the vision for AJNA Biosciences started way back in late twenty thirteen, in fact. My first meeting with the FDA, when all of a sudden you have these documentaries about a cannabis product helping this little girl and other children, that was very uncomfortable, I think, the medical community and for the regulators, right? So I had a conversation with the FDA and they said, You have a botanical drug, right? Unfortunately, hemp, which this is this first drug in the pipeline for autism, comes from hemp. Hemp wouldn't be technically legalized, removed from the Controlled Substances Act until late twenty eighteen.
Joel:So as an American company, that other drug that I mentioned went through the process because they didn't have DEA schedule one licensing, they're a British company, so they were able to skip all of that. We, as a US company, had to stay within a regulatory framework. So we I knew that we wanted to move into botanical drug development, not just with hemp products, but at large at about that time. But Charlotte's Web, my greatest good for the next five years of time was building a great company in Charlotte's Web and supplying a great product to the people that were using it. So that's what we did.
Joel:And the team that's come around, AJNA, I couldn't have, you know, such an all star roster in drug development and chemists, if not for the story of Charlotte Figge and the credibility we have from building Charlotte's You know, there are so many physicians out there. Charlotte's Web Web. May be one of the most doctor, not prescribed, but recommended supplements out there over the last decade simply because of all of the press that it received and the fact that it works for a lot of people. So our credibility and everything we learned at Charlotte's Web is how we got the team around us. Now we have scientific advisory board members, two that lead departments at Johns Hopkins, one psychedelic division, the other one cannabinoid research division.
Joel:We have, you know, Stacy Gruber leads cannabinoid research at Harvard Medical, people like this. We wouldn't have, you know, that kind of a team if not for some credibility. So building the team and building it out was actually pretty simple. We kinda had access to what I believe are the creme de la creme of cannabinoid researchers, psychedelic researchers. And our chief medical advisor, Doctor.
Joel:Orin Devinsky, he leads the neurology department at NYU, and he was the lead principal investigator, the guy who designed the clinical trials for the phase three trials for Epidiolex. So the only cannabis derived drug to make it through the FDA, we our chief medical adviser designed those trials through the FDA to approval. So those are, you know, this is really kind of the who's who for what we're doing, and it came together easier than I thought it would. I thought I was gonna have to really pound the pavement to get some of these experts, but no, they just really jumped on board. And what we've built is an incredible laboratory.
Joel:I mean, that's the other thing too, is when you're building a botanical drug versus a single molecule or synthesizing a molecule, very different process. You're starting in the field. You're starting with the genetics of your mushroom, of your of your cannabis plant, of your tree, whatever it is, and you're standardizing that that whole process before it gets to the lab so that your expression of different chemicals in your botanical raw material is the same. Now you've got to extract it so that it remains the same and so that you can reproduce it. Next part is the hardest part.
Joel:It's called chemistry manufacturing controls to the FDA, CMC. You have to be able to characterize this complex botanical drug substance. This is why very few people have gotten into botanical drug development. It's the hardest part. And I have a laboratory with top notch analytical equipment that for the first time really in the last decade have we been able to characterize so many molecules.
Joel:Right? And then I've got the team of expert chemists that can accomplish that. So you have to have you have to know what you're doing from the farm, producing your botanical, keeping it the same, then in the laboratory, then characterizing all these molecules, not just a single molecule. Then you have to have the clinical and regulatory experts to take it through FDA approval. I think that is what's special about us.
Joel:I do wish that there were more people doing botanical drug development, but as we get these drugs approved, I think we'll start to see lots of activity, even from big pharma in the botanical drug space.
Zach:Amazing. And, you know, as the CEO of our business has kind of had to chart my own path, you know, in terms of patient recruitment for clinical trials, the way things were done before didn't necessarily work for our business. And so there's, hearing what you're describing in terms of all the nuances to get R and D moving for a botanical approach. I'm curious kind of like in that process, what would have been some of like the inflection points or speed bumps that you maybe didn't expect and learn from? Because you're not taking the road that most people traveled on, you're kind of charting your own?
Joel:Yeah. I would say because of the expertise of of the team, we do have team members that have worked on botanical on the at least one of the four approved botanical drugs. We really haven't run into things that honestly early on I was afraid to run into. We also, you know, one of our team members is a man by the name of Jinwei Dao. Jinwei worked in the FDA for about seventeen years.
Joel:Jinwei wrote the FDA. He's the primary author of the FDA's botanical drug guidance. So he wrote the rule book that we use to move these through the regulatory process. So because of that expertise, we really haven't run into any major speed bumps, but I'll tell you, it's hard. Our first drug alone, you know, this is the full spectrum CBD.
Joel:It is a joint venture with my former company, Charlotte's Web, and we're going after the indication autism, irritability in autism specifically. As we've gone to characterize that drug to make it into phase two trials, you know, we've identified over 6,000 compounds. That's a lot of work. So we have chemists and, you know, both internal and external laboratories using their expertise to characterize so many molecules in a drug, and really no one's done that. Even the botanical drugs on the market are more simple than AJA001, which is which is basically taking everything we learned at Charlotte's Web, making it pharmaceutical grade, characterizing it, which is that hard part, and then moving it through the approval process.
Joel:So, I wouldn't say any major speed bumps, but it's just hard, and it takes so much work on the front end. Now that characterization is difficult. However, keep in mind, we skipped years because we know so much about these botanicals and because of our work at Charlotte's Web. We're actually using a strain from Charlotte's Web that that I was the inventor of. I I I was the first person to receive a plant variety protection patent for for cannabis.
Joel:So we have years of data on that strain. So when you compare that to developing a new drug, a new chemical entity, AI spits out a new molecule and says this might work for x y z. You have to go through years in the petri dish, in mice, before 95% of the time you never make it into a phase one human trial because it's toxic or it doesn't prove to really work the way that you thought it was going to. And that's usually, you know, anywhere between three and seven years in that process and millions of dollars. We skip all of that, but our hard part is in analyzing that substance.
Joel:So I wouldn't call it a speed bump. I'd just say it's been, we've learned a ton and everything we learned from drug number one applies directly to drug number two, right, and how to characterize these drug substances. One thing, we were very, very fortunate, and I would say this probably wouldn't have happened without our credibility of the team, all of the PhDs, renowned doctors. We also hold a DEA schedule one license manufacturing registration, which very few people hold those, and that speaks a lot to our credibility. Now I thought it would take a couple of years to get that license.
Joel:It didn't. They reviewed our license. Our track record credibility spoke for itself. So, you know, it's things like that that I would say, you know, I I was looking for a DEA schedule one license back when you know, back in 2013 when the FDA told me you should go this pathway. I couldn't because I couldn't get that license.
Joel:It goes to show how much has changed, and how much credibility there is around this project. So no major speed bumps. You know, fundraising, I'll say that. Fundraising through the last four years, and this is anyone that's been raising funds. Right?
Joel:I incorporated Ausna about six months before the crash. Right? So I was in April 2021, we're almost four years old. We've been very fortunate, been able to raise the funds we need to advance these drugs to where they are. But that was, I'll call it more than a speed bump.
Joel:That was a very stressful ride the last four years. The markets were down, but specifically, as you probably know, the biotech markets were abysmal, so.
Zach:The interest rate environment for the past few years still doesn't make fundraising an easy task. So yeah, it speaks to the momentum underlying the needs of patients that they're able to continue to get the momentum you get. Yeah, I did wanna touch on you, and you spoke about for a second, the recent DEFLORIA clinical trial win for your autism drugs. What excites you about kind of what you saw with the recent findings?
Joel:Yeah, so, you know, we've only completed phase one, but again, because we're using genetics coming from Charlotte's Web, early we created an observational research registry with Johns Hopkins to observe, you know, these effects that were happening in these children and adults for Charlotte's Web and products like Charlotte's Web. So before ever incorporating AJNA, before creating the joint venture and even starting to develop this new pharmaceutical out of that plant, we had data from Johns Hopkins, basically open label data showing statistically significant improvement in anxiety and autism, in depression and autism. So those signals, it's very rare that you get to move a drug into phase two, which is what we're going into with that kind of efficacy data. And that's kind of a benefit in general of developing botanical drugs. We already know that many of these things work, and in some cases we'll have a lot of data showing how well they work and how safe they are.
Joel:So as we move, our phase one clinical trial is basically healthy humans. We're just proving safety, establishing a maximum tolerated dose, which we did. We use that data to inform phase two clinical trials, which we've submitted to the FDA, they've cleared us to move into those phase two. So we won't be it's only this year that that will be an an official clinical trial for autism spectrum disorder. Right?
Joel:Do I feel that that's going to go well? I absolutely do. But again, keep in mind my past, I know personally hundreds, at least hundreds, if not over a thousand families that have used products like these to great effect with children with autism. So it's also something that the autism community really wants and needs. So getting I know for what you do with Leapcure, you know, the autism community, we have a lot of support for this drug, and part of it is that people are out there self medicating with CBD, THC products out there that are not really highly standardized.
Joel:That's a problem. But really more than that, there's only two FDA approved drugs for autism spectrum disorder, Risperdal and Aripiprazole. Both of those drugs, they work if you're you know, if you've got a child that's biting, self injurious, banging their head against the wall. But the way that those drugs work is they shut down the whole brain and they take the human out of the equation so parents lose the child, and then that causes all sorts of downstream side effects. So the autism community only has two FDA approved options with about the worst side effect profiles you can imagine.
Joel:I don't want to blast those drugs because in a last resort, those really help people. We're bringing an option that we pretty well have seen at work anecdotally thousands of times over, and it has none of those catastrophic side effects.
Zach:To talk about fundraising, know there's the new Start Engine fundraiser campaign that you're spearheading as well. Curious where you are with that and if there's any kind of takeaways so far.
Joel:Yeah, so this will be our second community fundraising round And community fundraising is kind of a new phenomenon. It's called Reg CF. So it is, you know, an SEC regulated raise, and you're only allowed to raise so much. The thing that I that I love about community fundraising is that, you know, back when I started Charlotte's Web, long before I took the company through the IPO, I could not allow regular people to invest within their means. Right?
Joel:You had to be an accredited investor. Minimum check sizes were typically $250,000 What community fundraising regulations allow for us is people that believe in what we're doing, they wanna see psilocybin make it for mental health, they wanna see these cannabinoid drugs make it for autism, people who believe in this can invest within their means. Now, we're only allowed to raise up to 5,000,000 annual through the platform, which for drug development, honestly, that's really small. Right? So I've been fortunate to have some pretty big backers.
Joel:Know, British American tobacco invested in drug number one, 15,000,000, which has got it up to this phase two status. So we do have to raise a lot more money than we can through community fundraising. But I like to talk about it because it represents a democratized opportunity in early stage biotech. You know, before now, really no one had the opportunity. You had to wait till the company had already built itself, gone public, then you could invest.
Joel:So this gives that opportunity as well as, you know, yes, I mean, 5,000,000 is not a small thing. It's I have to raise more than that. So I am raising, you know, it we're engaged with an investment bank, for for that joint venture, drug number one. So I do have to raise through the institutional, through family offices, through larger investors. But this campaign, I'm excited about it.
Joel:We did our we did a campaign last summer. It it was it was very successful. That was on the Wefunder platform, and I really liked them. We switched to the Start Engine platform, and we're about to go live with that raise, and it offers people the opportunity to come in and invest within their means. Right?
Joel:So this is you know, there are lots of people that like to play the stock market, and they may play the stock market with between 10 and a $100,000, but they're not writing $250,000 checks. And this gives people an opportunity to diversify in companies long before they go public. You know? And I don't promise that that Ojnu will go public. We'll go public if the markets are right and when the company is good and ready.
Joel:But nevertheless, whether we go public or not or, you know, if we're successful, become a dividending company, getting in at the early stage, that opportunity would not have existed without things like StartEngine. So, you know, I I would recommend people if they believe in the mission, believe in what we're doing, and they want to want want to play a part of it, they have that opportunity to add to their portfolio. And I would recommend, you know, there's lots of other great companies on those platforms where a similar democratized early stage opportunity exists. And there's lots of really big companies you'll see on there as well. I mean, you'll see SpaceX, You can invest in SpaceX on there and right?
Joel:And so, yeah, startengine.com. And philosophically, it's fun for me. I also have some back end reasons to have a really passionate group of retail investors that took the whole value ride. I love that.
Zach:That's awesome that you bring people in to be a part of funding it and we'll put the information for your Start Engine campaign on the link to the podcast. So yeah, I think, you know, as we kind of wrap up, it's been, you know, awesome to get a glimpse into how this has come to be, you know, you've come across, starting with your work at Charlotte's Web, a way to help a lot of people get quality, you know, medical care that and it's hard to kind of do all the work to kind of show, hey, this is this is different than than the people that aren't taking the botanical approach. And it's hard to kind of navigate, you know, the way that the regulatory environment is set up, your perseverance through it all, and just the way you think through it is super fascinating. So yeah, I appreciate you taking all the time to do this. One last question.
Zach:For people that are interested in kind of taking new products to market or interested in kind of exploring maybe something that has an existing profile the way you know, you had it, but but you know, others that are maybe trying to take on, you know, taking something from preclinical to clinical trials. What advice do you have for those folks?
Joel:You know, I think anyone that's taking a new chemical entity or a single molecule, an otherwise conventional drug through, right? I think there's so many resources for people to do that, there's a lot of people doing it. Anyone that looks at moving an efficacious botanical through the FDA approval process, I would say absolutely watch what we and just a couple of other groups are doing to learn that process. I do think it's important, you know, I think Ausna has lifetimes of work. And so as we develop botanical drugs into the future, and, you know, when there's 10 drugs in the pipeline and then 20 drugs in the pipeline, it's still just a drop in the bucket of the amount of medicine we've been given from nature that are going to prove to work.
Joel:And so, you know, anyone who's looking at it, I would say really watch us, watch Jaguar Health, they're one of the pioneers in it, they have one of the four drugs approved, and learn from our mistakes. If anyone is in the dietary supplement industry and wants to create great products, I encourage that as well. Not every product needs to be a drug, but what I encourage people that want to get into plant medicine, if you're going to take the dietary supplement path, which is much easier, you can go to market right away, that's wonderful. Please be of high quality, pay attention to how to standardize it so that people out there, even though it's not prescribed by a doctor and not in a pharmacy, so that people out there can have a reproducible experience with your product.
Zach:Amazing. Joel, thanks for taking the time and looking forward to being in touch.
Joel:Yeah, thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.
Leapcure:That was Joel Stanley, CEO of AJNA Biosciences and founder of Charlotte's Web, sharing his journey at the intersection of science, compassion, and plant based innovation. We hope this conversation gave you new insight into the evolving landscape of integrative medicine and the power of purpose driven leadership in healthcare. If you enjoyed today's episode, be sure to follow Leap Together for more conversations with leaders pushing the boundaries of modern medicine. Thanks for listening and until next time, informed, stay engaged, and keep pushing for better health outcomes for all.