Remember the simpler times of the mid-2010s, when you could order a latte or cocktail in California without the option of adding CBD?<\/p>\n
For Justin Gover, CEO of British drugmaker GW Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: GWPH), society\u2019s sudden embrace of cannabidiol (CBD), the other active ingredient found in the cannabis plant, is a trip\u2014though CBD won\u2019t make you trip. That\u2019s caused by THC, or tetrahydrocannabinol, the cannabis component responsible for most of marijuana\u2019s psychoactive effects.<\/p>\n
Businesses have been rapidly been building up around marijuana since states began legalizing its recreational use in 2012. More recently, CBD has been gaining in popularity as a potential treatment for health issues from seizures to inflammation, with businesses like GW cashing in. One study projected sales for the CBD market to reach $20 billion by 2024.<\/p>\n
Founded in 1998 to develop medications from marijuana, GW is based in Cambridge, UK. In 2015, Gover relocated to California to open operations in the US. GW\u2019s US subsidiary, called Greenwich Biosciences, is in Carlsbad, a city in North San Diego County. Today it houses more than 120 employees, or about 15 percent of the company\u2019s 800-plus-person workforce. [Paragraph corrects\u00a0founding year.]<\/p>\n
Historically, financing cannabis companies has been difficult; US federal regulations treat marijuana as a controlled substance. But now investors are looking to cash in on the growing legal marijuana market. Earlier this month, Silver Spike Acquisition (NASDAQ: SSKU)\u2014the third so-called blank-check company to launch this year targeting the cannabis industry\u2014raised $250 million in an initial public offering, according to IPO research firm Renaissance Capital. Such companies, which have no operations, raise money from investors in an IPO and use the money to make acquisitions.<\/p>\n
On the biotech side of the industry, it was only last summer that the FDA approved the first drug made from an active ingredient derived from marijuana: GW\u2019s cannabidiol (Epidiolex), a treatment for seizures associated with two rare forms of epilepsy.<\/p>\n
Many other CBD products are sold, both in retail stores and online, without similar regulatory oversight. While various benefits of CBD\u2019s use have been reported, health officials and regulators have called for doctors and patients to learn more about use of the compound. GW is one of the few companies to study it extensively with three clinical trials that involved 516 patients, which helped lead to FDA approval.<\/p>\n
Gover, who has led the company in raising more than $1 billion to fuel its growth over the past two decades, reflected last week on the company\u2019s history, and the societal and regulatory changes that have taken place since it launched, at an event organized by the UK Department for International Trade and Biocom, the life sciences trade organization.<\/p>\n
Here are five insights from the event, which took place at the Alexandria at Torrey Pines and featured Gover in a conversation with Biocom president and CEO Joe Panetta.<\/p>\n
\u2014Without patient advocates and the UK government\u2019s acquiescence, GW may never have gotten off the ground.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere started to emerge, at least in the UK, a significant patient voice\u2014and, I\u2019d say, particularly from the multiple sclerosis community\u2014talking about uses of cannabis for symptom relief. \u2026 The British government, at the time, didn\u2019t want to be \u2018soft\u2019 on marijuana, didn\u2019t want to be seen to be legalizing cannabis. On the other hand, they were actually very supportive of the idea of doing real research,\u201d Gover said.<\/p>\n
GW spoke with the UK\u2019s equivalent of the DEA and secured licenses to begin research, which began with an effort to standardize plant-based products and understanding the emerging pharmacology of the cannabis plant, he said.<\/p>\n
\u2014More than a decade after its founding, GW\u2019s first drug, nabiximols (Sativex), the first approved cannabis-based drug in the world, was OK\u2019d in the UK as a treatment for spasticity, a common symptom of multiple sclerosis\u2014but the company was struggling.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was very hard to raise money \u2026 Regulators were very skeptical; I would say the medical community was largely very skeptical as well,\u201d Gover said. But in 2012 there came a sea change, spurred by the family of Sam Vogelstein, a boy who has epilepsy, when they reached out to the company to learn more about its early research into CBD. (Read more about Vogelstein here.)<\/p>\n
\u201cThey, like many families that have children with refractory epilepsy, had tried and failed multiple therapies and had started to pursue nonpharmaceutical options,\u201d Gover said.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt that point in time, in California, CBD preparations and oils were starting to become available, and they\u2019d had some mixed success,\u201d he said. \u201cSam had been given some CBD oils and had seen some pretty dramatic reductions in seizures and yet there were other CBD oil preparations where the seizures had not had any reduction or indeed got worse. The family was really hopeful and yet frustrated at the same time about this.\u201d<\/p>\n
Vogelstein and his family flew to the UK and the boy took a CBD preparation GW formulated for him. The day he arrived he had 68 seizures. Weeks later, the day he flew home, he had none, Gover said. This anecdotal show of the potential of the chemical compound accelerated the research underway at GW, which, eventually, led to Epidiolex\u2019s 2018 approval in the US, Gover said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s remarkable to think that through this one boy\u2019s experience, through the science that we generated that led his parents to finding us, to then developing this product through normal placebo-controlled trials and manufacturing this product, that Sam now has this medication prescription\u2014and there are thousands around this country now \u2026 over 12,000 patients taking the medication today,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u2014Growing marijuana is easy. GW\u2019s intellectual property is around how it turns the plant into a prescription product.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of the things we realized at the beginning was that if we were going to develop a standardized medicine from the cannabis plant, that actually there was no contracting organization that really could do that,\u201d Gover said. \u201cThe size of the company that sits in the UK is a reflection of the fact that we do pretty much all of the key parts of R&D and manufacturing in-house. \u2026 The challenge, in terms of creating a medicine, really starts post-plant. The tens of millions in investment and the process, the technology, and the systems we have, are actually about taking that plant material and then going through various steps to end up with a pure product.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2014GW anticipates its drug for MS will be approved in the US and its drug for epilepsy in Europe\u2014and that it, and other companies, will develop cannabis-based drugs to treat other conditions.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor us as a company, I think we feel that the notion of cannabinoids as therapeutics in MS and in other areas \u2026 that era has now dawned,\u201d Gover said. \u201cI think we had to break down a number of obstacles, and some of it has taken 20 years to do that, but having done that, whether it\u2019s ourselves or other companies in the room or around the country that want to develop FDA-approved medications from the cannabis plant, those doors are clearly open. \u2026 It\u2019s a pretty interesting area now to be in, where I think\u2014I hope\u2014to see in another five to 10 years a whole range of these kind of medications.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2014The CBD craze, in a way, echoes the insight that prompted the company chairman, founder Geoffrey Guy, to start GW those 20 years ago.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you think about the cannabis plant as a plant that\u2019s been in medicine\u2014it\u2019s a medicinal herb, only in the past few decades did it become a recreational drug\u2014for three thousand years of medical use, and you hear that Queen Victoria was using it for this, and go back into ancient Egypt and China and all these different medical uses \u2026 In nature, the cannabis plant has more CBD than THC in it, and yet in the 1970s, \u201880s, and 90s, cannabis was essentially THC because it was bred for people to get high,\u201d Gover said. \u201c(Geoffrey Guy\u2019s) insight was, well, if you think of three thousand years of experience, to explain all of that through THC because the plants wouldn\u2019t have had much \u2026 His view, coupled with the science, was that CBD\u2019s got to play a role.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Remember the simpler times of the mid-2010s, when you could order a latte or cocktail in California without the option of adding CBD? For Justin Gover, CEO of British drugmaker GW Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: GWPH), society\u2019s sudden embrace of cannabidiol (CBD), the other active ingredient found in the cannabis plant, is a trip\u2014though CBD won\u2019t make […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":59,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","nova_meta_subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5572],"tags":[5796,13012],"supplier":[23105,1250,3334,14700],"class_list":["post-66239","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bio-based","tag-biotechnology","tag-phytopharmaceuticals","supplier-biocom-interrelations-gmbh","supplier-gw-pharmaceuticals","supplier-uk-government","supplier-us-drug-enforcement-administration-dea"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66239","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/59"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66239"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66239\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66239"},{"taxonomy":"supplier","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/supplier?post=66239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}