AJNA BioSciences

Have you heard the story of Charlotte’s Web?

No, not the children’s book about a pig and a spider. The one about the billion-dollar cannabis company.

It was started about a decade ago by the six Stanley brothers, who developed proprietary whole-plant health supplements using hemp. The company became the first-ever to file a cannabis-related patent. And just four years after launching, it went public and achieved a market cap north of a billion dollars.

Now, one of the Stanley brothers continues to bring plant-based medicines to consumers through his new venture, AJNA Biosciences.

This biotech company transforms plants into safe prescription drugs, and creates a new class of medication called botanical drugs.

Botanical drugs are FDA-approved pharmaceuticals made with plant medicine. AJNA is tapping into the abundance of unexplored plant and fungi species that hold the potential to be developed into potent therapeutic compounds.

This isn’t some form of pseudoscience. Plants have been used for millennia to heal and treat people. And AJNA’s team has extensive experience in drug development and features scientists from Harvard Medical, Johns Hopkins, and NYU.

Initially, AJNA is developing two plant-based drugs that are designed to treat conditions that afflict more than eighty million people. The first is called AJA001.

This drug is a cannabis-derived compound aimed at helping those on the autism spectrum. More than seventy-five million people battle autism around the world. And at the moment, there are only two FDA-approved drugs for these patients, both of which have intense side effects.

In 2023, AJA001 successfully completed Phase 1 trials, which confirmed the drug is effective and safe. Phase 2 trials began in 2024.

The second drug is an antidepressant made with psilocybin, or magic mushrooms. It’s intended to treat symptoms of General Anxiety Disorder and is referred to as AJA002.

In 2020, U.S. doctors prescribed more than 238 million daily-used antidepressants, which generated an estimated eighteen billion dollars in revenue. And this is only from the forty-three percent of people using some form of medication.

AJNA has a notable first-mover advantage. Only a handful of botanical drugs have been FDA approved.

To commercialize its drugs, AJNA will offer opportunities to license its intellectual property, co-develop drugs, and develop vertically-integrated drug products in a range of species and clinical indications.

AJNA has been awarded a patent and has raised twenty-five million dollars from angel and professional investors. This includes fifteen million dollars from British American Tobacco (NYSE: BTI), an eighty-four-billion-dollar cigarette manufacturer that invested in the startup’s lead drug, AJA001.

Team Background

Joel Stanley - Co-Founder & CEO

Along with his six brothers, Joel started a business growing medical marijuana for cancer patients in 2009.

After discovering optimal genetics in wild hemp that grew across much of America, the brothers founded Charlotte’s Web, where Joel would become Chairman and CEO. He spent nine years as its CEO and took the company public on the Toronto Stock Exchange in 2018. He also scaled company revenues to seventy-five million dollars annually.

In addition to his role with AJNA, Joel is a Board Member with Stanley Brothers, a cannabis business he started with his brothers that oversees Charlotte’s Web’s operations.

Orrin Devinsky - Chief Medical Advisor

Orrin is a neurologist who is the Director of the NYU Comprehensive Epilepsy Center and the Saint Barnabas Institute of Neurology and Neurosurgery. He’s also a professor of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry and NYU’s Langone School of Medicine.

In addition to his role with AJNA, he is on the board of the Epilepsy Foundation and is Chairman of the Medical Advisory Board for Tilray (Nasdaq: TLRY), a billion-dollar pharmaceutical and cannabis-lifestyle company.

Orrin’s focus is on epilepsy and its effects. He founded Finding a Cure for Epilepsy and Seizures (FACES) and co-founded epilepsy.com. He also co-founded the Epilepsy Therapy Project, a program that advocates awareness and study of those with epilepsy.

Notably, Orrin led the principal investigation for Epidiolex, the sole FDA-approved cannabis drug that tallied $845 million in sales in 2023.

Orrin earned a Bachelor’s degree and Master’s degree from Yale and his M.D. from Harvard Medical School.

Scott Hansen - VP of Operations

Scott is a pharmaceutical-operations expert, specializing in quality systems and driving market advancement for the cannabis and fungi markets.

Most recently, he was Vice President of Quality and Regulatory Affairs with Botanacor
Laboratories, a licensed testing company testing cannabis and industrial hemp. Before that, he was Director of Quality with the Stanley Brothers, the business overseeing cannabis enterprises including Charlotte’s Web.

Prior to that, Scott was a quality engineer and product-development scientist with Sandoz, a Swiss pharmaceutical company making generic medications that was, until 2023, affiliated with Novartis (NYSE: NVS), a $256 billion pharmaceutical company. He also worked at Sandoz as a chemist and materials manager.

Earlier in his career, he was a research associate and quality-control analyst at a handful of biotech companies. And he began his career as a pharmaceutical analyst with Novartis Consumer Health.

Scott holds a Bachelor’s degree in Biology from the University of Nebraska and an MBA from the University of Colorado Denver.

Co-Investors