CannDelta Inc. - Lucas C. McCann, Ph.D.
Our Silver Sponsor, CannDelta Inc., is a leading regulatory and scientific consulting company with offices in Toronto, New York City, and Hackensack, New Jersey. They pride themselves on a team of experienced consultants that have strong academic backgrounds in the life sciences sector and extensive regulatory experiences in the food, pharma, and cannabis industry.
CannDelta will be in attendance at this year's Career Fair to look for new talents to join their young but quickly growing team. For this occasion, we have a chance to talk with Dr. Lucas C. McCann, Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer at CannDelta, to give you an outlook on the company, the cannabis industry and what they are looking for in the next candidates. Check out the interview below!
At CannDelta, we're responsible for helping small businesses to get into new industries in the cannabis and psychedelic spaces. My background as an organic chemist got me a role at Health Canada in the Health Products branch, and I moved from there to work for a software company very quickly. And then, along with another person from Health Canada, we started CannDelta a few years ago. Since then, we've helped launch about 250 businesses across Canada and the US that are focused on cannabis, controlled substances and even a few pharmaceutical manufacturing companies so that they will be able to manufacture drugs that contain cannabis.
For someone to succeed at CannDelta, they really need to have strong attention to detail. We do a lot of preparation of supporting documents, standard operating procedures, licensing applications, and they have to be extremely coherent. Sometimes, that means working with somebody else's reports or works and being able to carry that tone and level of consistency throughout the application.
“Someone who would do well in this role would be someone who's very motivated, wants to make a splash and look for something that challenges them every day.”
Being a consultant is a very engaging job; it takes a lot of time, energy and focus to be able to do well. The work that we do comes from helping our clients to achieve their goals. So we get to live vicariously through them. And for folks that enjoy meeting with people and clients, whether on Zoom or in our boardroom, they would have a great time here. We are not always behind the scene; we often work with our clients directly, sometimes conducting site visits, audits or inspections, and folks that are able to carry a conversation or build relationships tend to do very well in such a role.
For those that do become consultants at CannDelta, they've got an excellent career path. We've got excellent development programs in place for folks coming in regardless of their level of education. We've had interns come in with undergraduate degrees, certificates, Master's degrees and even Ph.D. We find that academically inclined folks tend to do very well because they are usually very good at doing homework, and a lot of what we do can be very similar to a very complex homework assignment. There's a huge opportunity to learn because we are helping to construct multimillion-dollar facilities by providing our input or helping our clients to make very important decisions that will potentially affect their success in the long road. There's a lot of responsibility but also a great sense of fulfillment.
There's a lot to be seen in the cannabis industry because it's a very new industry. We've had a medical framework for a couple of decades now, but the recreational adult use framework in Canada just launched about 4 years ago. It's an over-regulated, taxed industry because there's a heavy hand from Health Canada in terms of compliance and enforcement. There are also lots of work opportunities. We were very busy with licensing and starting new businesses when we first started the company, which then shifted to providing operational and expansion support for our clients as they continue to be successful. And we're also watching what's happening stateside in New York, New Jersey, and other states south of the border as their recreational adult use and medicinal markets are also coming online too.
Another interesting aspect is that we're starting to see a big de-stigmatization of cannabis in general, which has led to further investigation in clinical trial work, especially in the psychedelic sector. It was just announced today that Toronto's CAMH has become the first to receive federal funding for a study on psilocybin and its use in treatment-resistant depression. In some cases where folks have been living with depression and haven't been able to resolve it with drugs or psychotherapy, they now have the option of participating in this study and seeing if psilocybin could be a solution for them. So it really aligns with a lot of work that we're doing, like helping folks achieve dealer licenses or involving in clinical trials. Mental health is hugely important and getting a lot of attention these days, which is fantastic. And potentially, with these new compounds, there could be a new tool to assist folks in therapy.
“I'm generally a very excited person. I love coming in every day; every day represents a new challenge. I have a very fun office space to work with great colleagues, and we all make sure that we celebrate our victories.”
It's very exciting being at the helm of a new business in a new industry because you never know what's coming down the pipe. Every day we're looking for new news articles that are coming out, we're getting alerts sent to us, and we get to pivot very quickly. The other thing that's been very exciting is that there are very few competitors to what we're doing. So we have a lot of opportunities for perpetual growth and expanding our team with the right people. And that's something that really makes us excited.
The work environment is great. We have an open concept office with our own workstation, which is very collaborative. We have a lot of meetings, and we also get to host our clients here on site or potentially even visit them at their facilities. There are lots of hard workers here; I would say many are very determined to produce high-quality work. We also have a great office space with a basketball game, a couple of arcade games, and a really nice, beautiful space to be able to work in the downtown core of Toronto. I think that makes a fun experience coming to work. You know, we dress professionally, but we're here to have a really good time. And on Friday, at the end of the week, we celebrate a beer o'clock together, enjoy each other's company, talk about what we plan to do for the weekend, and repeat it again next week.