Medical cannabis company donates $1 million to explore plant’s healing potential

Media Release | June 8, 2015

Herb Dhaliwal, Chairman of National Green Biomed with Julio Montaner, M-J Milloy and Claudette Cardinal. Photo: Martin Dee, UBC

Medical marijuana producer National Green Biomed Ltd. has committed $1 million to the University of British Columbia to allow researchers to study the therapeutic effects of cannabis. The company has made an application and is awaiting approval from Health Canada to produce and sell medical marijuana.

Click to enlarge. Photo: Martin Dee

The contribution will support research by assistant professor of medicine M-J Milloy, who is studying marijuana’s potential to treat HIV, and alleviate pain and nausea caused by acute illness and medications used to combat HIV and AIDS.

Milloy, an infectious disease epidemiologist with the UBC Division of AIDS and the British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, was the lead investigator on a study published in March that found that HIV positive people who used marijuana at least daily had less than half the concentration of the HIV virus in their blood compared to people who rarely or never consumed cannabis. The study, published in Drug and Alcohol Review, was the first epidemiological evidence from human studies that shows cannabis interacts with the underlying mechanism of HIV disease – not just its symptoms.

M-J Milloy

“Because cannabis has been seen primarily as a recreational drug, its medicinal implications have been much overlooked in formal research circles,” said National Green Chairman Herb Dhaliwal, a former MP and federal cabinet minister from Vancouver. “Now, thanks to evolving attitudes, it’s time for the science to catch up. We believe our partnership will help UBC create a standing research program into the possible therapeutic benefits of medical cannabis.”

Milloy examines barriers to effective HIV and AIDS treatment, such as homelessness and incarceration, and how addiction treatment can facilitate adherence to HIV therapy. He is leading a U.S. National Institutes of Health study involving about 1,000 people living with HIV/AIDS who also use illicit drugs. He also participated in the scientific evaluation of Insite, Vancouver’s supervised injection facility, and helped demonstrate how it reduced the number of overdose deaths in the Downtown Eastside.

“We have long heard from our patients that they perceive that they obtain health benefits from cannabis use,” said Dr. Julio Montaner, head of the UBC Division of AIDS and director of the British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS. “This contribution will allow us to begin to rigorously assess whether these benefits are truly real.”

The partnership resulting from National Green’s contribution forms part of UBC’s start an evolution campaign, the most ambitious fundraising and alumni engagement campaign in Canadian history.

“One of the great virtues of universities is their willingness and freedom to look for answers in unconventional places,” said Arvind Gupta, UBC’s president and vice chancellor. “Canadian attitudes on the issue of marijuana’s legality and availability are still very much in flux. But if marijuana can help reduce pain or nausea, or even treat disease, we have a duty to find out. We are grateful to National Green for supporting our efforts to help answer these questions.”

BACKGROUND | MEDICINAL MARIJUANA

A new venture: National Green Biomed was incorporated in 2014, founded by a group that included Dhaliwal and David Sidoo, a private investment banker and a member of the UBC Board of Governors. The Richmond, B.C. company is awaiting a license from Health Canada to cultivate marijuana at a site in the Fraser Valley Regional District. National Green has already contributed $200,000 to UBC researchers and the remaining funds will be given out over five years.

Promising signs: The medical role for cannabinoids is not definitive. Although laboratory-based studies have often yielded positive results, the number of controlled studies using placebos in humans has been limited by the legal prohibition against marijuana. One promising study in 2011 found that in an animal model, intravenously-administered THC led to lower levels of the simian version of HIV and to increased life expectancy.

An evolving marketplace: Since April 2014, Canadians with a signed doctor’s recommendation can legally buy marijuana from one of 19 private, federally-licensed producers. The producers ship the product directly to consumers, after verifying the legitimacy of the medical document. (The U.S. federal government, meanwhile, still categorizes marijuana as having no proven medical value.) A large but unknown number of Canadians self-medicate with marijuana obtained illegally. Colorado, Washington, Alaska, Oregon and Washington, D.C. have legalized marijuana for non-medical use.

Oral sprays and capsules: An oral spray derived from marijuana has been available by prescription to treat pain in multiple sclerosis patients since 2005. Another drug, an artificial version of THC in capsule form, is prescribed for nausea and vomiting caused by chemotherapy, and to treat appetite loss among people living with HIV.

Find other stories about: British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, Cannabis, Faculty of Medicine, Medical marijuana, National Green Biomed Ltd., start an evolution, UBC Division of AIDS

Contact

Brian Kladko
UBC Faculty of Medicine
Email: brian.kladko@ubc.ca
Office: 604.827.3301
Mobile: 778.838.4169

http://news.ubc.ca/2015/06/08/medical-cannabis-company-donates-1-million-to-explore-plants-healing-potential/

Iran opens first herb museum containing over 1,700 herb samples

Iran opens first herb museum containing over 1,700 herb samples

1. Home
2. Iran
3. Economy

Wed Jun 10, 2015 5:31PM

File photo shows workers collecting medicinal herbs in Iran's West Azarbaijan Province.

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Iran has inaugurated its first herb museum, also known has herbarium, containing more than 1,700 samples of various herbs.

According to Iranian media, the herbarium was inaugurated at the Shahid Beheshti University in capital city, Tehran, on Wednesday.

The opening ceremony was attended by top officials of the Shahid Beheshti University as well as deputy head of Iran's Tourism Bank for marketing.

According to the report, the herbarium which is affiliated to the Shahid Beheshti University’s Medicinal Plants and Drugs Research Institute, contains a valuable trove of over 1,700 herb samples.

The herbarium is internationally registered and specializes in Iran's medicinal plants. It will also develop a comprehensive bank of plant essences, extracts, and seeds in the near future.

Medicinal plant samples of the herbarium have been collected by a team of Iranian specialists and their extracts have been obtained using various solvents and different processes.

Iran has made great advances in various fields of medicine during the past three decades despite illegal sanctions imposed against the country on account of its peaceful nuclear program.

An official at the Iranian Ministry of Health announced in early May that the Islamic Republic has become a producer of some recombinant drugs, which were previously produced only by a number of developed countries, thus ending their monopoly in the field.

Akbar Abdollahi-Asl, Iranian Food and Drug Administration's deputy for supervision and planning, added that apart from the original producing country, Iran is now the only country capable of synthesizing the molecule of recombinant Factor VII, which is used to treat hemophiliacs.

Also on April 26, ISNA news agency reported that Iranian researchers have produced a nano-drug, which has proven effective in battling treatment-resistant cancers.

According to the report, the polymer-based nanocarrier was produced by the Cancer Research Center of Tehran University of Medical Sciences for the targeted release of the anti-cancer drug, curcumin.

Curcumin, which is found in the turmeric, has anti-cancer and cancer prevention properties apart from its anti-oxidant and anti-inflammatory properties, said Dr. Ali Mohammad Alizadeh from the Iran Nanotechnology Initiative Council.

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http://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2015/06/10/415247/Shahid-Beheshti-University-herb-herbarium-museum

 

Wonderful medicinal plants

 Tuesday, June 09, 2015

 By 

EDNA GARDE

EDIBLE LANDSCAPE

HAVE you realized how wise is the Lord for creating “all things nice and wonderful?” That’s a line from a poem I remember way back in grade school.

Wonderful! That is how I consider the plants God created from the beginning. So wonderful are the plants around us that each of them has its own purpose. This is what I contemplate upon finding my treasures of knowledge at home. What I retrieved from my files is the manual of my training some years ago, during the hype of organic farming and herbal medicine.

During that training entitled, ”Prospects and Challenges for Production, Processing, and Marketing of Philippine Medicinal Plants,” herbal medicine and natural or homeopathy were already beginning to gain momentum, through mostly the non-government organizations and private practitioners.

In fact, our main lecturer on that training was no less than the former undersecretary of the Department of Health (DOH)— Dr. Jaime Galvez Tan, who was already operating then his own pharmacy of herbal medicines.

That was the beginning of my inclusion of herbal plants that are medicinal in my own garden. There are many plants that we learned to be medicinal—21 of them actually—but I will discuss only those which are commonly known.

Number one is garlic (Allium sativum Linn), of course. You know already how it is being used by many people as medicine. It contains the very interesting element germanium, which is able to protect the human organism against carbon monoxide poisoning (like exhaust fumes), normalizes blood pressure and immune response effective at 30-150 mg. When I went to the grocery store last week, the smallest packaging of the roasted garlic costs P50 already.

Other common ones are guava, gabi, katuray, lagundi, malunggay, ginger, mongo, neem tree, papaya, sabila, sambong, takip kuhol, tsaang gubat and akapulko, among others.

The rest that do not sound familiar to many are the following: Balanoi, Kabling, Japanese Honeysuckle, Moras, Chinona and Damong Maria. Each one of these herbal crops has a cultivation manual by Dietmar Rummel of CITEM (Center for International Trade Expositions and Missions).

It was a rewarding experience for me when I was fortunately included in the training with the NGOs’ farmer-leaders and some staff of BIND (Broad Initiative for Negros Development) because it is really a useful knowledge until now. Those farmers that were my classmates in the training are making a livelihood of herbal medicine until now.

From Dr. Tan’s lecture I learned that medicinal plants are the natural living treasures of our country. Do you know that about 1,500 medicinal plants from 13,500 plant species of which 3,500 are endemic, only 120 plants have been scientifically validated for safety and efficacy, and only 10 have been promoted by the DOH and PITAHC since 1993?

Published in the Sun.Star Bacolod newspaper on June 09, 2015.

http://www.sunstar.com.ph/bacolod/lifestyle/2015/06/09/wonderful-medicinal-plants-412130