Effective cannabinoid therapeutics promise far bigger payoff than cannabis harvesting.
When inquiring minds ask about medical marijuana use, Dan Sutton is quick to state his credentials.
“I’m in no way an academic or a researcher or a physician,” said the founder and managing director of Maple Ridge-based Tantalus Labs, one of 10 firms licensed to cultivate medical marijuana in B.C. “I’m an entrepreneur.”
So, while there is an abundance of anecdotal evidence promoting the medical benefits of cannabinoids – the chemical compounds in marijuana that get a reaction from the brain – Sutton said there’s little quantifiable data documenting their effectiveness.
“The core problem is the regulated cannabis-delivery systems that are licensed in the ACMPR [Access to Cannabis for Medical Purposes Regulations] are [in] very early days, and it’s largely agricultural.”
In June, two Vancouver organizations announced a partnership that will seek to see if science supports cannabinoid-based therapeutics for neurological disorders like epilepsy, multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease.
This collaboration will see the Centre for Drug Research and Development (CDRD) examine the safety and efficacy of these treatments and take an equity stake in any pharmaceutical-grade products that come out of those trials. Aequus Pharmaceuticals Inc. would in turn commercialize and market the products borne from the research.
CDRD CEO Gord McCauley said the partnership is based on clinician demand for cannabinoid-based treatments that have better side-effect profiles than cannabinoids themselves.
“It’s a particularly exciting opportunity for patients who want to access cannabinoids but are afraid of some of the potential side effects,” he said.
“[It’s] really serving clinicians as well, to help them understand exactly under what circumstances and what doses they should be prescribing.”
Aequus CEO Doug Janzen, whose firm has developed non-cannabinoid-based therapies for kids suffering from epilepsy, hears frequently from clinicians unsatisfied with the lack of hard data on cannabinoid-based treatments.
“We’re having parents with kids with epilepsy going on a Facebook [Nasdaq:FB] page, making treatment decisions and then going to a dispensary where some high school dropout is choosing products to be used,” he said.
Though Health Canada provides Canadians with access to cannabis for medical purposes, there are no standards for dosages or preferred methods of ingestion.
Aequus interviewed 200 specialists about the barriers to recommending these treatments and found the No. 1 problem for doctors was they did not believe in consistency of dose.
“They have no clinical data to really make a decision,” Janzen said. “The current methods of delivery, inhaling or smoking or ingestion, are not precision and in some cases are harmful.”
And, if the clinical data bears fruit, the CEO said it’s still difficult to put a number on market potential for pharmaceutical-grade treatments.
But Janzen said licensed cannabis growers who foresaw government policy veering toward the legalization of recreational marijuana will no doubt find themselves generating revenue as commodity suppliers.
“But, typical of commodities, they quickly become undifferentiated. What we’re interested in is providing products clinicians can refer patients to and value-add,” he said.
“People who grow tomatoes don’t get paid as much as people who make great tomato sauce.”
credit:420intel.com
