Halted since July of this year, right in the midst of a six week rise, the pubco formerly known as Lifestyle Delivery Systems, now Core One Labs (COOL.C), unhalted today and, as expected, took an immediate stock price dive.
Having shut the door to trading in July at $0.73 as the exchange enforced a change of business process, and with a financing having been undertaken four months ago at the post-stock split equivalent of $0.19, there’ll be no shortage of folks looking to take their chance to either claim profits, or get clear of what’s rightly been perceived as a horror show by many.
Lifestyle Delivery Systems was infamous for making big promises, and missing on those promises while making grander plans still. Former CEO Brad Eckenweiler angered shareholders and exhausted IR guys, taking years to get Cannastrips off the ground and botching a potential merger.
Long suffering shareholders on a variety of social media platforms have been griping for months about the carnage Eckenweiler left behind, and their frustration that plans to reset have taken longer than hoped. Today, however, they get the deep gum cleaning they’ve long been asking for, as totally new management opens the doors having finalized their ‘fundamental change’ review with plans to sell off most of the old cannabis assets and focus on shrooms going forward.
A switch to psychedelics won’t satisfy everyone, but the plans afoot will make use of at least one core LDS asset – perhaps the only asset that ever really made sense: The Cannastrips tech and production equipment.
In July, right after the exchange yanked their chain, Core One Labs announced it was purchasing Vocan Biotechnologies, a genetic engineering and biosynthesis research firm. Their deal:
Vocan’s team of scientists, specializing in protein expression and biosynthetic fermentation, has discovered a patentable method of producing psilocybin, the active ingredient in psychotropic mushrooms, and its technology will produce cGMP (current good manufacturing practices) API-grade psilocybin, which can be used by pharmaceutical companies, API manufacturers and medical research organizations conducting clinical trials.
Layman’s terms: Instead of growing mushrooms and extracting the psilocybin (which isn’t cheap), Vocan says they have a patent-worthy tech that would allow them to synthesize it (which would be cheap), and at a price that would allow them to provide base synthesized psilocybin to any drug company that wanted to include it in a treatment of their own.
Big, if true.
Big, in that it would wreck the business models of half the shroom companies out there raising money right now, as they promise to produce shroom juice when the law makes that doable.
In essence, Core One could be to shrooms what the multi-billion dollar GW Pharma (GWPH.Q) is to cannabis medication.
And that Cannastrips production line would be easy to tweak to provide psilocybin strips, dealing precise dosage for medical patients, of which Core One has a database of 200,000 stemming from their recently completed purchase of the Rejuva and Shahcor medical clinics in BC.
The Company will aim to prove increased efficacy and bioavailability of existing and novel drugs, including psilocybin, with its proprietary delivery methods currently utilized by its CannaStrip technology. Bioavailability of cannabis constituents in the Company’s CannaStrips infused strip allow for more efficient absorption of the active ingredients, which is an optimum delivery system for microdosing. Medical patients who want to receive alternative health treatments can use this less invasive way of treatment to help alleviate their symptoms and complications.
But first, the stock is going to get wrecked and take a mighty fall that may go on for a few days.
So steer clear for a bit. Let’s talk next week.
UPDATE: Early action sees COOL land at $0.35, which is stronger than I expected. If it forms a base from here, that’d be an interesting sign that there’s more people ready to hang tight and give new management a chance than many expected.
— Chris Parry
FULL DISCLOSURE: Core One Labs is an Equity.Guru marketing client, and we’ve been involved at an earlier financing stage.