Despite Cannabinoids Study, ‘Odds Aren’t Fantastic’ It Will Ever Treat Covid

While a recent study found that cannabinoids protected cells in a petri dish from SARS-CoV-2 infection, “working in a petri dish is a relatively low bar for a drug to clear,” Slate points out. “The conventional wisdom in pharmaceutical sciences holds that, of every 10,000 drugs that shows potential effectiveness, only one will make it to market.”Dish experiments need to be followed up with animal studies, and then comes the rigorous gauntlet of human trials. And between cells and humans, there’s a lot that can go wrong. In a dish, scientists can deliver a drug precisely to where it is needed, but it’s difficult to know ahead of time how drugs will move through a body and whether they will reach their intended targets, such as the lungs and the upper respiratory tract. At this stage, it’s impossible to know how CBDA and CBGA will fare, but the odds aren’t fantastic. Other drugs that showed similar early promise for treating COVID have since failed spectacularly, harming users and sowing political discord in the process. Ivermectin, azithromycin, and hydroxychloroquine all fought coronavirus infection in cells, but we now know that they do nothing to prevent or treat COVID in humans. But at least cannabinoids are largely safe; humans have been guinea pigs in their Phase 1 trial for millennia. Another important caveat: even the researcher’s study was only proposing cannabinoids “as a complement to vaccines.”Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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