MARKET WATCH: NBC News reports, “The drug “has been shown to reduce pain and nausea” in cancer patients. AIDS patients also use cannabis to eat, sleep and otherwise be more functional. Turns out that cannabidiol has none of the psychotropic effects of marijuana as a whole. The researchers hope to move to clinical trials on humans soon to test the cannabidiol inhibition of metastasis, reported in the San Francisco Chronicle. “What they found is that the cannabinoid turns off the overexpression of ID-1, which makes the cells lose their ability to travel to distant tissues. In other words, it keeps the cells more local and blocks their ability to metastasize. (spread to a new location) The researchers stressed cannabidiol works only on cancer cells that have these high levels of ID-1 and these do not include all cancerous tumors but, rather, aggressive, metastatic cells. But they’ve found such high levels in leukemia, colorectal, pancreatic, lung, ovarian, brain and other cancers.” MORE
BUSINESS STANDARD: A compound found in marijuana could halt the spread of many forms of aggressive cancer, a new study has claimed. Researchers found that the compound, called cannabidiol, had the ability to ‘switch off’ the gene responsible for metastasis in an aggressive form of breast cancer. This substance, importantly, does not produce the psychoactive properties of the cannabis plant, the ‘Daily Mail’ reported. The research team from the California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco, first spotted its potential five years ago, after it stopped the proliferation of human breast cancer cells in the lab. “The preclinical trial data is very strong, and there’s no toxicity. There’s really a lot or research to move ahead with and to get people excited,” study co-leader Dr Sean McAllister told the San Francisco Chronicle. McAllister along with colleague Dr Pierre Desprez acknowledge that they are some way off from turning their finding into a pill, they are already developing human trial models. MORE