By Sheree Hoddinett
It’s been years in the making, but it’s finally time for the first harvest at Spring Sciences Australia (SSA).
For those who haven’t heard of them, SSA is an Australian-owned phytopharmaceutical company based in the City of Moreton Bay (Caboolture). They hold all the requisite licences and permits necessary for the cultivation, production and manufacture of GMP medical cannabis products.
SSA was first established in 2019 with the objective of developing a business based on the cultivation of high-quality medicinal cannabis. The original design concept was based on the successful business of Driven Grow, a Spring Sciences group company based in Michigan and a major conveyor of premium quality medicinal cannabis flower since 2015. SSA is focused on a fully automated climate controlled indoor cultivation operation capable of producing up to 10 tonne of dry flower per annum at full production and the manufacturing of superior medicinal cannabis extract products to deliver high demand raw material and innovative medicinal and infused products to the market.
SSA Chief Executive Officer Dr Steve Newbery and the rest of the team are excited to see this next step come to fruition.
“It’s another step forward in the process,” he said. “We were excited to get our seeds and then to pop them, see them establish roots and then become plants.
“Now, we’re at the first point of harvest, it’s great to see. But of course, there's four more rooms that still need to come online before we have all rooms fully operational. Moving forward from there, we hope to be harvesting every two weeks, which means the trim room is super busy and the dry and the cure room is full, it's going to be a sight to behold, that's for sure.”
The first harvest will be going to a Brisbane-based company, but SSA has already received great interest from other locations, including overseas.
“There's a real hub of cultivators and other parts of the medicinal cannabis industry developing in southeast Queensland and northern New South Wales,” Dr Newbery said. “We have been working to try and develop business relationships with them, particularly clinics or pharmacy groups, but other growers as well.”
SSA will operate as a business-to-business supplier, which is why they’re known as a phytopharmaceutical company.
“We’re working to overcome the traditional stigmas attached with medical cannabis, to differentiate ourselves from our peers, but also as part of our move to a higher level in the sense that we're producing a medicine and we need to be a company that fits the role as being a producer of a phytomedicine, a plant-based medicine,” Dr Newbery said. “Our facility gives us that.
“Now that can be in the form of flower and or extracts from cannabis and or extracts from other plants which are of medicinal use.
“We have been taking the company in a direction and putting ourselves out there saying this is who we are, this is our facility, this is what our capabilities are, this is the quality of the product that we're going to be producing and why.”
Smart grow cultivation practices, enhanced with in-house tissue culture capabilities, will be combined with cutting-edge AI and automation technologies to realise the SSA proprietary precision grow process. Their operation is fully indoor, automated and climate-optimised, adhering to the strictest biosecurity and phytosanitary measures to ensure the
production of standardised phytopharmaceutical products.
And what a set up SSA has! The facility features a licensed cultivation area which spans 2950m², as well as an area for tissue culture activities and dedicated rooms for plant initiation, clone rooting and clone acclimatisation. At full capacity, the initiation room will support around 30,000 plant embryos, with facilities to root 16,000 early-stage clones and acclimatise 3500 plants, readying them for transfer to the grow rooms.
Post-harvest, the SSA process includes a wet trim and meticulous phytosanitary steps, vital for producing non-irradiated flower. Their soon-to-be GMP-certified areas handle drying, curing, extraction, distillation, storage, packaging and distribution.
“This extensive setup not only meets but surpasses the rigorous quality standards necessary to be producing pharmaceutical-grade cannabis production,” Dr Newbery said. “This is an investment in plant genetics, sophisticated cultivation practices and technological innovations, which is all going towards our goal of setting a new benchmark for Australian-grown and manufactured phytopharmaceutical medicines.”
The growth in production will also ultimately lead to the expansion of the facility’s team. SSA currently has a team of 17, with the hope to soon grow to 30 employees. The Caboolture facility will act as a hub for the company’s operations, with a longer-term plan to add a number of local satellite broadacre grows and strategically located regional indoor cultivation facilities.
For further information, please visit https://springsciences.com.au.
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