Plandai collaboration offers opportunity to produce a non-psychoactive cannabis product for medical research

If successful, the company could then move forward with medical research investigating whether or not the product is efficacious in areas like cancer, post-traumatic stress disorder, concussions, epilepsy, concussions, multiple sclerosis, and neural diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

In September, Uruguay’s Minister of Public Health agreed to sanction Plandaí’s growing cannabis for medical research, through its wholly-owned subsidiary, Plandaí Biotechnology — Uruguay, SA, in collaboration with the Group of Medicinal Chemistry from the School of Science at the University of the Republic in Montevideo, Uruguay.

The company can now legally grow cannabis in a supervised clinical environment, and with this collaboration, it won’t be just CBD dominant strains of the drug; instead, Plandaí believes that it may be able to produce a cannabis profile that includes THC, which studies have suggested could yield medical benefits in multiple fields.

While others in the industry are focused on producing a low-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) cannabis product, in order to avoid the psychoactive effects, Plandaí believes this strategy ignores the potential benefits of the plant’s principal psychoactive constituent or cannabinoid. Instead, Plandaí plans to study the possible synergistic benefits of combining the full chemical profile of cannabis.

There are a number of reasons that keep most entities away from THC altogether; including, the legal ramifications and the social stigma associated with the use of THC. Many users of medicinal cannabis products want to realize the medical benefits of cannabis without the psychoactive side effects or the associated "high" with THC.

Plandaí, on the other hand, has an extraction process that works with live-plant matter and yields an extract that contains the full chemical profile, including THC and CBD, without the psychoactive effect. How is Plandaí able to do what other entities cannot?

Cannabis in its natural state is not psychoactive. It is only through drying and/or heating of the plant that the acid forms of THC (THC-A and THC-B) are metabolized into the psychoactive THC form containing the associated "high." With the exception of Plandaí, most other forms of processing, extraction, and consumption of cannabis involve the use of dried or heated plant matter.

By using live-plant matter and controlling the temperature during the company’s extraction process, Plandaí anticipates being able to produce a highly-bioavailable cannabis extract that uses the entire chemical profile but that doesn’t produce any psychoactive effects.

If this proves successful, then Plandaí could likely present a product that could be suitable for medical clinical research in multiple areas that have possible therapeutic applications including cancer, PTSD, epilepsy, MS, concussions, and neural diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

Plandaí’s first product, a green tea-based catechin extract, will be brought to market in December 2014, and has already demonstrated in independent human clinical trials that it has ten times the bioavailability of a generic extract. As this technology is brought to other plants, including cannabis, the company hopes to create a family of all natural products that have the potency to generate real clinical results in treating disease and promoting overall health and wellness.