BRC Featured in Stanford Business Magazine for its Novel Approach to Cannabinoid Drugs
The Biopharmaceutical Research Company’s “mother room” is in a warehouse-like building attached to a cinderblock office that’s as inconspicuous as the startup’s name. Entering is momentarily disorienting: A high-powered fan thrums overhead and every inch of the spotless white space is suffused in intense pinkish light. Visitors put on specialized sunglasses to filter out the mix of red and blue wavelengths calibrated to encourage maximum growth in the 177 female cannabis plants growing inside.
Decked out in white coveralls and hair, beard, and shoe coverings, George Hodgin, MBA ’17, surveys the crop arrayed along two 30-foot-long tables. “Kyle, do you have any favorite moms yet?” Hodgin, BRC’s founder and CEO, asks director of production Kyle Ruddy.
“This one’s growing very nice,” Ruddy says, motioning to a plant that, to the untrained eye, looks exactly like each of its neighbors sticking out of cubes of growing medium. “But I try not to really pick my favorites at this stage.”
Over the next few months, up to 80% of these plants will be culled. Each of the survivors will be trimmed to create 30 to 40 new plants, which will be transplanted and harvested in March and again in June. “Until we see the flower,” Ruddy says, “I don’t really like to make any judgments.”
After it’s been picked, the marijuana flower will be processed here in Castroville, California, and then sent to customers across the country. Ordinarily, shipping cannabis across state lines is a federal crime — yet BRC operates entirely within the law and with the blessing of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). “We grow federally approved cannabis plants,” Hodgin says. “We manufacture drug substance here, which means we extract, isolate, and process it, and then ship it to research partners, clinical trial sites, finished product formulators, biotech companies, and pharma companies.”
When he was a student at Stanford Graduate School of Business, Hodgin discovered a glaring disconnect in the cannabis industry: Millions of Americans were gaining access to legalized marijuana, yet research into the drug’s medical potential was stagnant. He began the laborious process of securing the DEA licenses necessary to produce the plants that might birth a new generation of cannabinoid-based pharmaceuticals. “Is there a way to crack the federal code around cannabis?” he recalls wondering. “The answer is yes. And it took us a lot of years.” The next question was, “Could you build a venture-backed business designed to help people researching cannabis? We think the answer is yes.”
BRC closed a $20 million funding round in 2022 and now employs 19 people. It’s building a clean manufacturing room in preparation for scaling up its operations. “Our vision is to use the power of cannabinoids to treat unmet medical needs to help patients around the world,” Hodgin says.
As one of the few federally approved cannabis producers, BRC occupies an unusual spot in the United States’ cannabis industry. But then, almost everything about this industry is unusual. No longer totally illicit, but not fully legit, it operates in a regulatory and financial gray area. Yet it’s no longer a taboo or a punch line.
Hodgin, a former Navy SEAL who had no connection to the cannabis world before he founded BRC, has seen this shift firsthand. A few years ago, he says, it wasn’t uncommon for potential funders or partners to brush off the entire industry. “Anybody that didn’t like cannabis for whatever reason — philosophically, morally — they could kind of ignore it.” Today, like it or not, that’s changed. “You can’t really ignore it anymore.”
