This post was originally published on September 10, 2026, as an article on Harold’s LinkedIn profile. You can read and leave comments here.

My previous articles talked about the importance of cannabis PK/PD research and the pioneers in the space. In this article, I’m excited to share how Vertosa is taking an innovative approach to capturing the recreational effects of cannabis. We’ve all heard the story. Someone took a gummy, didn’t feel anything, took more, then it hits all at once followed by hours of anxiety. Alternatively, imagine drinking an infused beverage and feeling the onset before finishing the can, allowing us to pace ourselves, enjoying the gradual ramping effect. The question we keep asking at Vertosa is: how can we measure those subjective experiences accurately? Can we measure both the intensity and also the mood alteration? And if successful, can we leverage this process to help the industry design & validate products with desired experiences?

Building the foundation

In 2025, we looked around the cannabis industry and realized no company has done PD in a consistent, scalable and scientifically rigorous manner. Most likely, the development team would try the product, and launch it if they generally like it. A standard playbook didn’t exist, so we decided to write one.

PD is a scientific process, and if we want the data to be trusted by consumers, regulators, and peer reviewers, we have to start with an established framework. We brought in some world-class advisors to help shape every decision we made: Dr. Adie Rae as our Lead Advisor with support from professors from Johns Hopkins and Harvard Medical School.

The next critical step was obtaining IRB approval. For anyone unfamiliar, the Institutional Review Board (IRB) is the body that oversees the safety and ethics of research involving human studies. Historically, IRBs have been very conservative towards cannabis research. We were fortunate to find a great IRB partner who has a progressive philosophy. Without IRB approval, we couldn’t publicly talk about the study, which makes IRB a critical piece within the PD process.

As we began building our PD program, we turned a few technical challenges into innovations, redefining the future standards of PD study for the cannabis industry.

Innovation 1: Asking the right questions

The gold standard for measuring acute drug effects is the Drug Effect Questionnaire, or DEQ. It has evolved over the years, and its current version contains 26 questions. It is comprehensive, validated, and has been used in research for decades. The problem is that 16 (or 60%) of those questions focus on negative effects, such as: from 0-100, do you feel paranoid, do you feel sad, do you feel anxious or nervous?

That framework made sense when cannabis research was primarily about harm reduction. But we’re in a different era, and the products developed by the cannabis companies have specific intended experiences such as social connection, focus, creation, relaxation, or sleep. If we want to understand whether a product is delivering on those benefits, we need to ask different questions.

So we built something new. We took the DEQ, layered it with the Bond & Lader Questionnaire, and added Vertosa custom questions specifically designed for infused beverage experiences.

The Bond & Lader questionnaire itself consists of a series of 16 bi-directional adjective pairs presented as visual analogue scales, where participants indicate their current state along a continuum between two opposing feelings, such as alert ↔ drowsy, calm ↔ excited and sociable ↔ withdrawn.

This two-directional structure allows each question to simultaneously capture shifts in both directions, rather than treating them as separate constructs. The format is intuitive, fast to complete, and highly sensitive to subtle changes over time, making it particularly well-suited for repeated measurements in a PD study. By framing experience as movement along a spectrum, Bond & Lader provides a more balanced and nuanced readout of mood and cognition, enabling us to detect directional effects and translate them into meaningful domains that align with real consumer experiences.

We built those questionnaires into an app, so participants could complete it on their phone or computer. This ensures clean data collection without transcription errors.

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As cannabis infused beverages appear in different social events, their effects should blend into the situation and enhance those particular experiences. Currently, the industry believes cannabis beverages could contribute to 6 main types of effects, shown below.

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Unlike the straightforward effect from alcohol, those different effects bring nuance into the PD measurement. Even the combination of DEQ and Bond & Lader has limitations to capture some of the feelings. This encouraged us to develop custom questions which go deeper into consumer’s desired activities, and could be further modified when we evaluate individual SKUs based on the desired experience outcome.

The end result is that we created a hybrid questionnaire that gives us scientific rigor using validated tools with the consumer-relevant framing the industry actually needs.

Innovation 2: Focus groups for cannabis PD

Historically, performing cannabis effect studies on humans was really rare, due to its Schedule 1 nature. When institutions like Johns Hopkins run these studies, they need to capture as much data as possible. That is why PD was usually done together with PK, where one coordinator manages one participant in a clinical environment with blood draws happening alongside the questionnaires for over 8 hours.

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Typical research setup when performing PK/PD test on cannabis product

The process is very controlled to ensure high consistency and minimize side effects.  However, the same setup also brings in challenges. It lacks the communal environment, as the participant has to spend 8 hours by themselves, monitored by a coordinator, in a research environment. Also, when participants go through the process of drawing blood, it impacts their mood, which could discredit the effect outcome. Lastly, this 1 on 1 process is very slow, cost ineffective, and not scalable, making it unsuitable as the industrial standard.

This led us to our second innovation. We decided to run PD without PK, meaning participants could focus on how they feel in the moment without the distraction of drawing blood. We also leveraged the typical consumer focus group setting, where all participants meet in a comfortable environment. This would reinforce the communal experience, allowing us to capture the true recreational effect from the product. We validated this by inviting the same 12 participants to join 3 rounds of testing on different emulsion formulas across 3 separate Saturdays. Uber riders were provided to ensure everyone’s safety, and we tightly controlled timing, food consumption, and environment. Snacks, fruit, and water were offered to ensure participants felt comfortable. We also pre-selected magazines, coloring books, and documentaries to ensure participants have things to do while not getting impacted by intense content. The process went smoothly and every participant had a good time contributing to the science of cannabis research.

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Vertosa PD test with the focus group setting

This process is less controlled than a clinical setting, but it is faster, more scalable, and provides data with real meaning to the industry.

Innovation 3: Making the data meaningful

During data analysis, we realized certain questions belong to the same category so we put them together to find a trend that is more representative. For example, we put Clear-Headed ↔ Fuzzy, Attentive ↔ Dreamy and Proficient ↔ Incompetent into the same category to describe Cognition. In the end, we came up with 7 unique groups of effects, including Intensity, Reward, Side Effects, Vitality, Cognition, Contentedness and Connectedness.

The benefit to this method is that no single question is overpowering the result thus the outcome is more meaningful. Instead of the result sounding like “participants scored more on the scale towards Attentive”, this innovation allowed us to say for example “this formulation meaningfully moved the Cognition domain.” This could relate better to how brands position products and how consumers evaluate their experience.

What’s next

This is the first step at Vertosa towards a PD process that is scientific, reliable, and scalable. For it to be used as the future standards, we still have a lot of validation and modification to do.

We see the value in creating this framework because the industry needs it. As infused products continue to innovate and mature, we need tools to help us design and validate effects that enhance consumers’ life experiences. Imagine a future where a cannabis beverage at a comedy club is precisely formulated to help you relax, drop your guard, and fully lock into every punchline. You’re laughing harder than ever, completely in the moment. Now imagine a long-haul flight where a different formulation gently eases you into deep, restorative rest. You wake up as the plane lands, feeling recharged, clear-headed, and ready to go. These are not distant fantasies. They are entirely within reach, but to get there, formulation alone isn’t enough. We need trusted tools so we can measure and tailor those experiences.

Let’s build towards this future, together.

Dr. Harold Han — the “Happy Chemist” — combines his storied background in emulsion chemistry and science with curiosity and fascination in the rapidly growing cannabis industry. Developing nano and micro emulsions his entire career, Harold holds a Ph.D in Surface Chemistry from NYU and is the holder of multiple patents for his inventions in emulsion chemistry.

As the Chief Science Officer at Vertosa, Harold spearheads the company’s development of industry-leading and customized active ingredients for infused product makers, offering pre-suspended aqueous solutions to create incredibly homogenous and stable products while maximizing bioavailability, clarity, and taste.

To learn more about the science of cannabis, make sure to follow Harold on LinkedIn and check out his Happy Chemist videos.