After announcing his resignation from Jefferson Health via email, Charles Pollack, a professor of emergency medicine at the university, revealed that he's now the new chairman of the scientific advisory board for FSD Pharma, a marijuana cultivation and production company based in the province of Ontario.
Formerly an emergency medicine professor at Jefferson and the founding director of the health system's Lambert Center for the Study of Medicinal Cannabis and Hemp, Pollack's resignation was announced just this Wednesday. Recently, Jefferson Health had hit a jackpot with its cannabis bet, what with the implosion of its plan to create the world's biggest medical marijuana patient database finally starting to get traction, as well as an academic research program that was stalled due to the number of setbacks the university went through.
Despite this, Thomas Jefferson University's stakes on marijuana paid off, what with Ecofibre, a company that grows thousands of acres of hemp in Kentucky, going public on the Australian Stock Exchange and granting Jefferson with an initial $2.1 million stake. And that's not all, as the East Falls campus also now serves as the research and development arm of Ecofibre's Hemp Black subsidiary, which currently develops textiles, hemp-based materials, and wearable fabrics that could monitor the heart rates and other vital signs of patients.
The resignation, however, came out of nowhere.
A sudden move to FSD
Widely considered the "driving force" behind the Lambert Center, which aggregates scientific studies on marijuana and dispenses grants for research into the plant and its wide array of products, Pollack will now be serving another marijuana company, the Ontario-based FSD Pharma.
Presently, FSD Pharma plans on building the world's largest indoor hydroponic cannabis production facility in an old Kraft facility located about an hour east of its Toronto headquarters. A former Kraft plant in Cobourg, the old production facility will be turned into a working cannabis production bay, with multiple companies working alongside FSD Pharma inside it. Under Pollack's guidance and leadership, the company plans to effectively integrate itself more into Canada's marijuana space, using the former professor's knowledge about medical marijuana to ensure all of its products are of the highest quality. He will also now be working to advance FSD Pharma's medical strategies in the company's cannabinoid therapeutic programs.
FSD Pharma has a current market cap of $299 million, with its stocks trading at 22 Canadian cents per share as of writing.
