We know many of our readers are implacably opposed to this, and not without reason.
Our own sentiments are decidedly mixed, as we’ll explain, but whatever your attitude, TRUCE will continue to cover developments in the sector as objectively as possible.
The realities in play include a) that MC is going to be a huge (multi-tens of billions/year) market, b) the pharma companies have huge economic heft, and c) the FDA is far more oriented to the single molecule/huge clinical trials model than it is to more chemically complex whole plant cannabis, despite its amazing safety profile which makes most of the agency’s hugely expensive safety trials unnecessary.
Bottom line, the drugcos are going be an integral part of the medicinal cannabis story, and in some potentially positive ways.
It’s true that their role to date has been less than helpful, sometimes overtly destructive, and we’re not fans of the synthetic cannabinoids on the market (to say the least) for various reasons.
Still, one trend we’re seeing – as in this article – is that some companies are moving towards products derived from actual cannabis rather than synthetics – as in GW’s “Sativex” and now this company’s new techniques.
The fact is, there will be places where their expertise will take MC where the whole plant market (currently at least) can’t, i.e., specialty applications that will involve, for example, placing specialized preparations deep in the body.
Speculating further, as the whole plant product producers become larger and more sophisticated, they may begin to enter this same category and directly challenge the drug makers.
Even as Utah law makers strive to keep our state frozen in 1937 (:\), the rollout of cannabis medicine continues to move forward in faster leaps and bounds than even the most optimistic of us projected just a few years ago.
This article concerns a company working on “the extraction and microencapsulation of cannabinoid molecules for a variety of pharmaceutical delivery formats … [derived] from medicinal cannabis.”
“The process, developed and tested in the Netherlands under strict regulatory guidelines, involves growing selected cannabis plants at a cGMP [“current Good Manufacturing Practices”] facility followed by extraction of the cannabinoid molecules from flowers in a process employing just two steps, achieving an average of more than 99% purity – unlike traditional methods that include toxic solvents and multiple steps to produce … [a product] such as dronabinol [“Marinol”].
AXIM’s microencapsulation method is applied to the cannabinoids, protecting them from oxidation and degradation. Finally, the cannabinoids are manufactured into pharmaceutical products within different delivery formats.”
More in the article….
TRUCE: The more you know….
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