New biologically active compounds from cannabis
Thursday, April 9th, 2009 at 2:41 pm | By: Radical Russ
Although a lot of work that has been done on cannabis, scientists have not identified every cannabinoid, so many research groups are continuing to identify and categorize the chemicals in cannabis. Samir Ross from the University of Mississippi led one such group in the discovery of nine new cannabinoids, and they published the structures and biological activities of these chemicals in an advanced article in the Journal of Natural Products.
The researchers grew plants from high-potency Mexican C. sativa seeds and harvested the whole buds of mature female plants. They performed chemical extraction and purification procedures on the plant material to isolate the nine cannabinoids. … After figuring out the chemical structures, it was crucial to know how useful these molecules might be in terms of medicinal properties. The first good news was that none of the cannabinoids were toxic to cells extracted from African green monkey kidneys, which meant that they have potential as drugs. Upon closer inspection, several of the compounds had respectable biological activities, as well.
Compound 5 had potent antileishmanial activity, which makes it a possible candidate against leishmaniasis, a parasitic disease that is spread by the bite of the sandfly. Compound 8 was effective at killing Staphylococcus aureus, a frequent cause of staph infections, and compound 7 had good activity against Candida albicans, a fungus that gives people oral and genital infections. The other cannabinoids weren’t as biologically active, but they all had some drug potential. For insistence, compounds 2 and 6 were mildly affective against MRSA, and compound 1 had some antimalarial activity.
The identification of these biologically relevant cannabinoids will give natural product chemists new ideas for future drugs. Even the less active ones can turn out to be useful, as chemists can make modifications of the structures that are more potent.
via New biologically active compounds from cannabis – Ars Technica.
Oh cannabis, is there anything you can’t do? Didn’t these guys get the memo from the US government that cannabis has “no recognized medicinal value in the United States”? Oh, wait, sorry, my bad – that’s only raw natural cannabis that is medically useless. If you break it down into its cannabinoid compounds, patent it, put it in a pill, mark it up 2,000% – 20,000% for a healthy profit, and require people to go through a doctor and a pharmacist to get it, if they can afford it and their insurance will cover it, then it has “accepted medical use” and is only capable of “moderate to low dependence”.
