Pancreatic cancer disappeared in 70% of mice treated with a cannabis compound

Cannabis could be a key to fighting pancreatic cancer – one of the most deadly forms – suggests a recent study by Harvard University.

Scientists have tested the effects of compounds derived from marijuana, called flavonoids, on pancreatic cancer cells in petri dishes and on animals with the disease.

Pancreatic cancer is one of the most difficult forms to treat the disease, killing 93% of people with less than five years of age.

Flavonoid treatment killed all tumor cells by 70% of pancreatic cancer mice, which researchers tested for this study, published in Frontiers of Oncology last month.

The treatment has also overloaded more traditional radiation therapy, giving researchers hope that by 2020, the promising treatment could be ready to be tested on humans.

Notably, the compound studied by the Harvard team comes from cannabis, but is neither a cannabinoid, such as CBD, nor a psychoactive component of the plant, such as THC.

Instead, flavonoids are the compounds found in virtually all plants (including fruits and vegetables) that give them their vibrant colors.

There are more than 6,000 variants of flavonoids, but Harvard scientists believe that one of the possibilities offered by cannabis would be to create a compound called FBL-03G.

Cannabinoids are already used and studied to treat unpleasant side effects of conventional cancer treatments such as chemotherapy and radiation therapy.

In recent years, many studies have explored the potential of this plant to treat cancer itself.

Research has shown that cannabis may block the growth of the tumor in a variety of ways, but it has remained uneven and the way the plant has these effects remains unclear.

"People have already studied before showing that sometimes cannabis was acting against cancer, and sometimes not," said the co-author of the new Harvard study, Dr. Wilfred Ngwa, at DailyMail.com.

He attributes much of these discrepancies to the wide variation in the composition of any given plant or variety of cannabis and to the lack of coherence in this sense from one study to the other.

"So, maybe the plant we're investigating in Boston is very different from the one we're studying in California," says Dr. Ngwa.

The studies often look at some of the constituent elements of cannabis, so to speak, rather than focusing on the possible functioning of individual compounds.

Curious to discover this last point, Dr. Ngwa and his team first separated several parts of the cannabis plant and conducted preliminary tests to determine which parts showed the most "activity" against their tumors .

That's how they landed on the flavonoid FBL-03G.

They placed FBL-03G in a petri dish containing pancreatic cancer cells – a type of tumor they were already studying in their labs – and watched it work.

They also used a type of intelligent radiotherapy to inject the compound directly into metastasized tumors in mice with pancreatic cancer.

"We were very surprised by the results," says Dr. Ngwa.

"We were expecting it to show some inhibition of tumor growth, but we were pretty surprised that it [also] inhibited the progression of the tumor in other parts of the body.

& # 39; We actually had to run [additional] steps to see if that was really true.

C & # 39; was.

Not only did the treatment stop the growth of tumors, but in about 70% of animals, radiotherapy and the FBL-03G combination reduced the size of the tumors.

It is not known if the cancer could return, but for the moment, the majority of the mice were without cancer.

Dr. Ngwa and his team do not know exactly how flavonoid therapy works, but they have two theories.

"We believe that cannabinoids have immunity-modulating properties," says Dr. Ngwa.

One of their theories is that the cannabis flavonoid "can create these antigenic cells that cause T cells, like a vaccine – to recognize the disease," he says.

Their other hypothesis involves a process called "apoptosis".

"It kills cancer cells, but in such a way as to expose the camouflage of cancer cells that hide them from T cells."

It is possible that these processes mean that the immune system will "remember" cancer if it also returns.

But do these promising results mean that cancer patients should turn to cannabis, its oils and extracts?

"We have a lot of patients asking this question," says Dr. Ngwa.

"We need more studies" to find out, he says.

"People only use cannabis oil formulations and you do not really know what are the active components of these."

He is quite convinced that there are active and anticancer components in cannabis, but that "each cannabis plant produces completely different levels of active components".

It is also possible that the various elements of the plant work "systematically", says Dr. Ngwa, and even derive a single component, like him and his team was much cheaper than the manufacture of most drugs.

But for now, patients need patience, "he says.