How Cannabinoids Attack COVID
Early research surprises scientists
In recent weeks a rush of cannabis research papers appeared in the news, all containing some very exciting discoveries about how CBGA and CBDA messed with COVID’s crown-like spike-formation and thus kept the virus from infecting healthy cells.
In molecular terms, CBGA and CBDA are world’s apart from CBD, but those distinctions got lost in the noise. Medical research studies are usually a real snooze fest, and the key study was a real slog to read, but a good first look into the workings of phytocannabinoids at the molecular level. Yes, initial reports seemed to be true. Two cannabinoid acids, CBGA & CBDA, prevented the COVID virus from forming and weakened the virus’s ability to enter human cells. But…
“Cannabinoids Block Cellular Entry of SARS-CoV-2 and the Emerging Variants” https://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/acs.jnatprod.1c00946
Cannabigerolic acid [CBGA] and cannabidiolic acid [CBDA] prevented infection of human [skin] cells by a [virus that looked like COVID] and prevented entry of live [COVID] into cells. Importantly, [CBGA] and [CBDA] were equally effective against [two COVID variants]. [Humans can eat and absorb these compounds] [that have] a long history of safe human use, these cannabinoids, [purified] or in [full plant] extracts, have the potential to prevent as well as treat infection by SARS-CoV-2.
Please note that the research above was done with petri dishes and microscopic amounts of tissue. No human tests had been done at this point. Nevertheless, this was very exciting news. Cannabinoid science at this depth is still relatively young and we’re still learning about its complex, sophisticated, and mystifying effects on our bodies. But, there’s a lot yet to be discovered about human biochemistry.
Can You Trust The Data?
It’s a bit sad, I know, but whenever a new cannabis study makes headlines, it makes me want to claw my eyes out. (I used to have a similar reaction to stories about hackers when I was in infosec…) Pop media comes up with a catchy headline that totally miss the point, then it’s hype and hyperbole for three or four days, but no one is any wiser about what the real significance
a lot of the controversial studies they choose to report on. How many “wonder drugs” have gone viral based on “a medical study”? How many skin creams are sold because some “breakthrough technology”? Lots.
What should you look for when you’re reading ground-breaking new research — of any kind? Ask yourself how realistic are these claims of the researchers? Are they known crackpots or experienced experts? Who sponsored the study? Good studies are very expensive! Where did the money come from for the labs, personnel, equipment, etc? What ties do they sponsors have to government, academic, scientific, military, medical or commercial industries, etc? There’s far too much hidden money in studies.Would you trust a study funded by a herbal brand over a government-study funded by a hospital? These are things to consider.
Vetting studies and papers is very important aspect often missed or ignored by the popular press. Conflicts of interests aren’t always apparent and discredited papers float around the Internet forever, even when they’ve been discredited as fake. There’s no way to be totally rid of bad science papers. This leads to an enormous amount of misunderstandings and misinterpretations, especially when medical cannabis is involved. The bad reporting adds to the ignorance and bias in popular culture.
I checked the bone fides of the CBGA, CBDA Covid studies and they got a thumbs-up from me.
A Data Tsunami of Cannabinoid Studies
No sooner had I waded through the CBGA/CBDA paper than several new research papers on CBD and COVID were released all at once, reporting even more surprising news. CBD seemed to be more promising than any other cannabinoids in the fight against early COVID infections. In lab experiments, high doses of CBD attacked the COVID virus from several different flanks at the same time! Queue John Snow’d infamous battle in GoT for a visual. This is an enormous difference from most drug therapies that focus on one avenue of attack. CBD is also much, much cheaper and easier to extract and package than CBGA and CBDA, and CBD has an “incredible safety profile”. Give that line to your GPs and you’ll get their attention. They love it when you learn and understand ‘medicaleze’. But, I digress.
We’ve known for quite a while that CBD has remarkable antiviral properties, but we didn’t know exactly *how* it worked at the molecular level. The paper “Cannabidiol inhibits CARS-CoV-2 replication through induction of the host ER stress and innate immune responses” is a very large and carefully controlled study, in several different countries at once, that looked at what happens when the COVID-19 virus encounters CBD. It involved dozens of labs taking part in several different experiments, tons of different researchers, at least 24 authors, and it was all coordinated by the University of Chicago with a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). That’s impressive for any pre-clinical study.
Short primer on virus infections
When a virus enters your body, viral particles enter your body’s cells and hijack the machinery inside each cell to manufacture more viral bits that fill the cell until it explodes like a puffball mushroom, releasing even more viral particles. Those viral cells try to enter even more of your body’s cells, and so on and so on. When the infected cells realize they’re in danger, they send out signals to your body’s immune system to launch an army of antibodies at the virus like the cavalry to the rescue. At the beginning of an infection, your body may have a few hundred infected cells but, by the time the infection is at its peak, there are billions of viral bits in your cells and bodily fluids. Your body’s response will often cause distinctive dysfunctions, like loss of appetite, or a build up of mucous for example.
Your immune system is huge and enormous and confusing and it has many different kinds of cells. Each cell is like a soldier in the immune system army and they all have special duties, special weapons, and special powers. My favourite is the macrophage. They’re really bad-ass like Rambo but they also kiss everything better, just like Mom. Cool stuff.
Examining CBD’s Superpowers
So what’s amazing about these petri-dish experiments with Covid and CBD is that CBD acted like an early alert to the immune system that something seriously wrong.
There are a number of different ways a drug can try to stop viruses, like trying to prevent viral bits from entering cells, stop the virus from growing once inside cells (infection), or attack infected cells quickly and robustly. If the virus is a new type that your body hasn’t seen before, your immune response may be slow to kick into gear and the effects of the infection can become quite severe. One of the hallmarks of early COVID-19 was that our bodies were slow to recognise the danger. By the time our bodies finally recognised the danger, the immune response became overwhelmed with too much help. This is known to medical professionals as a ‘cytokine storm’.
CBD prevented COVID spikes from forming
Researchers used tiny amounts of human lung cells, coated them with CBD, and then left them to soak for two hours. Then they infected the lung cells with COVID and let them marinate for 48 hours. What they found was that the COVID virus was not forming the infamous “spikes” that are used to poke into the “skin” (epithelial) membrane that encloses cells. Hmmm… interesting.
Then they tried the same thing with kidney cells from monkeys. Same results! So then they tried the same experiments with three more strains of COVID and it worked every time. To make sure it was really the CBD working, they repeated the experiments with CBD from four different suppliers to make sure this wasn’t all a fluke. It wasn’t. Further experiments continued with THC, CBDA, CBDV, CBC, and CBG, but they offered very weak protection, if any at all. Most remarkably, when researchers treated cells with both THC & CBD in equal amounts (1:1 ratio), the antiviral effect was greatly *reduced*.
CBD helped cells become aware of COVID much earlier
The experiments showed that CBD was not just effective at preventing COVID from infecting cells by keeping spikes from forming, but it helped healthy cells recognise that COVID was a danger much earlier in the game. One of the many weirdnesses of COVID has been that our bodies have been slow to recognise its presence but, when they did see the COVID virus, the immune system overreacted and created a potentially deadly reaction called a “cytokine storm”. CBD seems to activate a cell’s spidey sense by enhancing its interferon signalling (“Something’s interfering! Need help here!”) that gooses the body’s immune system into action, but not so much that it causes an over-response.
CBD healed and left protection against future infections
When researchers looked closely at cells that became infected with COVID, they noticed that CBD kept the viral bits inside it from growing and multiplying. Not only that, but CBD almost completely reversed the damage caused by COVID and the cells were left with additional protection against future infections. Researchers repeated the experiments with CBDV but it was 40% less effective than CBD and it didn’t repair cell damage.
Mighty Mouse!
Medical research often finds that what works in lab dishes doesn’t necessarily work in live bodies. That is why scientists often use specially bred mice to see if they can get the same results. In the next phase of this experiment, mice were injected with CBD, two times a day for seven days. Then COVID was introduced via the mice’s noses and the CBD injections continued, twice a day for four more days. On the fifth day they found that CBD “significantly inhibited viral replication in lungs and nasal turbinates” in the early stages of a COVID infection. This was dose dependent and a higher dose worked better than a lower dose. CBD did not work as well if the infection was more advanced.
But, what about people??
Since these experiments with infected lung and kidney cells were just proof-of-concept exercises, clinical trials with human patients were not conducted. BUT… these researchers wanted to see how people who take CBD on a regular, prescribed basis have fared with COVID infections in the real world.
Researchers used the medical records of cannabis patients using Epidiolex to treat seizure disorders (aka epilepsies) and the records of registered medical cannabis patients taking at least 100mg/ml of CBD daily to identify people who were likely taking CBD during the COVID pandemic. People who were not taking CBD were used as a control group for comparison’s sake. When the records were examined, they found the CBD users had “significantly lower rates” of COVID infection than the control group. The demographics and medical histories of the CBD patients were otherwise similar to those of the matched control group. What we don’t know is if the group taking CBD took more precautions against COVID infection, like shielding, isolating, masking, disinfecting, and so on than the people who were not taking CBD.
Several other recent studies that looked at CBD’s effects on the COVID virus had very similar results. I haven’t had time to wade through them all, but they all conducted similar experiments and the results are all remarkably similar and no less exciting.
What does all this mean? My predictions.
It means that it’s a safe bet that more GPs will start reconsidering their anti-cannabis beliefs and be open to consider CBD therapies. After all, we’ve had at least a decade of clinical proof that CBD is non-toxic, even at very high doses. In other words, It Won’t Kill You. That’s very important to doctors. Lots of doctors who are unfamiliar with cannabis medicine are concerned about liability issues and they don’t want to advise patients to use anything that’s dangerous.
I would expect cannabis doctors who have patients with suppressed immune systems to begin advising patients to ingest high doses (100mg/ml+) of medical-grade CBD as a possible prophylactic for COVID infections — especially if the patients are immunosuppressed.
It’s a safe bet that vendors and marketers of CBD-based products will kick into high gear again, at least for a while. There are some excellent CBD manufacturers who can be relied to deliver good, clean products, but there will be ten times more scammers selling snake oils to an unsuspecting public. Word to the Wise: “CBD” sold in gas stations and convenience stores isn’t likely to be high quality stuff. Even if it does have any CBD in it, the amount is likely to be minuscule and contaminants and toxins may be present. The commercial CBD used in the University of Chicago were Bluebird brand, so I feel comfortable releasing that information.
Remember that the studies showed that THC actually *reduced* the anti-viral effects, so don’t take them together.
Human bodies find it difficult to absorb CBD that’s eaten but taking oral CBD meds with something fatty, like coconut oil, ice cream, or nut butters, will boost the absorption a bit.
These studies have already spurred tons of other studies, including government-funded research studies with human volunteers. Those usually take eons to conduct but, given the urgency of the COVID pandemic and the continued mutations of the virus, I expect public and private investment and support for these studies will light a fire under faster approvals. This is a sticky area because CBD is sold to the public under “dietary health” regulations that are much looser than drug regulations. If CBD is officially re-designated as a medical drug, it has to be controlled much differently and free access to it could become a legal nightmare. But that’s a discussion for another time. For now these studies carve a notch in the Good News column.
Clinical Trials Are Recruiting Patients
I hadn’t actually expected to see that there were any CBD-COVID studies yet, but the database of clinical trials at the US National Institute of Health (NIH) is a superb resource. A simple search showed there are at least 9 clinical studies in the works, and some of them are still looking for volunteers. The data is pretty easy to find. Information on the research sites, the criteria for volunteers, and the contact information are included for every study. Sometimes a study will be conducted at many different sites at the same time.
When I’ve applied for clinical trials in the past, I got a pretty quick email response, followed by a phone interview if I passed the first screening process. If you’re excepted for a clinical trial, they often want you to report exclusively to one doctor or location. Sometimes volunteers are paid, but often not. In any case you’ll be medically checked before the trial begins. Please note that some of trial start dates have changed due to the COVID pandemic. Hygiene restrictions have been especially difficult to work around.
Using the ClinicalTrials.Gov database
Hopefully you’ll find my links and screenshots useful in navigating your way around the Clinics Trials database. If you’re desperate to find treatment for a condition, the information provided with trials can at least get you pointed in the right direction because the names of hospitals, universities, and doctors give you an idea as to where to start looking for help.
A search for clinical studies that are currently recruiting volunteers shows that there are four in the database, two of which need people in many different US States and different countries around the world.
Two of the studies I pulled up were recruiting in several locations at once. One listing showed 34+ plus locations in the US States, Brazil, Germany, and Mexico.
The number of volunteers required is listed…
… well as the medical criteria.
And contact information is listed for each location.
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