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Cannabis Authenticity & Purity Standard (CAPS)

Cannabis Authenticity & Purity Standard (CAPS)

Purity-IQ is pleased to announce the launch of their global Cannabis Authenticity & Purity Standard (CAPS), designed to verify and validate the safe and consistent supply of legal cannabis and hemp, from inputs to final products and throughout the supply value-chain.  

Cannabis and hemp are natural products increasingly consumed for their perceived health benefits by those seeking alternative nutrition and medicine to deal with common ailments such as chronic pain, anxiety, infections, and compromised immunity. In many jurisdictions where these products are legally available, government regulations tend to stipulate only the basic safety requirements. In most other established industry sectors, brands, retailers, and consumers demand far more than the minimum regulatory requirements and usually impose more rigorous safety and quality brand protection measures from their suppliers.

During the Steering Committee session, Dr. Steven Newmaster, Director of the NHP Research Alliance at the University of Guelph presented the unique and innovative science elements. “As part of a medical cannabis proof of concept, we are now able to uniquely identify a given strain / cultivar based on both metabolite profiles using Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) and DNA chip bioinformatics. The data analytics form a unique cultivar IP 'Fingerprint' in the Purity-IQ Global Cannabis Registry, which can be used to verify 'batch-to-batch' consistency in on-going quality assurance programs,” states Dr. Newmaster. 

During a recent CAPS Steering Committee meeting participants also interacted with presenters such as Roger Muse, a Vice President at the ANSI American National Accreditation Board (ANAB), who spoke about the value of third-party accreditation, standards, and testing methods specifically designed for the cannabis industry. “We are excited to be working with Purity-IQ whose CAPS third-party certification will combine requirements for ISO/IEC 17065 accreditation process together with ISO/IEC 17025 laboratory accreditation. As a condition for doing business, the CAPS certification process will provide brands and specifiers with much needed safety and consistency assurances.”

The Purity-IQ Global Cannabis Registry will serve as an important tool to satisfy an industry need for tracking and tracing cannabis and hemp products. With strict permissions and securities, the Global Cannabis Registry will routinely be pushing scientifically validated “Fingerprint” data into trusted data sources and blockchain partners. 

“The need to scientifically identify genomic and chemical attributes as a form of benchmarking all cannabis-based inputs prior to performing clinical trials is of monumental importance,” states Paul Valder, Co-Founder and Chief Technical Officer for Purity-IQ. “Today we have the capability to process and register cultivars from legal producers and sellers to create a unique 'Fingerprint' designed to populate the Global Cannabis Registry for easy reference purposes. Within weeks Purity-IQ will also finalize and provide Standard Operating Procedures for product stability testing at Purity-IQ recognized commercial laboratories.”

The CAPS Certfication Program welcomes a limited number of cannabis industry stakeholders, who may interested to participate in the Technical Industry Working Group (IWG), to review a draft of the technical requirements and provide comment for the final CAPS Beta Version, due for publishing and implementaion by the end of 2020. Those interested, please contact Amber Thelen, Purity-IQ Technical Compliance Manager, at amber.thelen@purity-iq.com. Note: the IWG is limited to 25 industry operators and stakeholders.

 

 

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