GB Sciences announced that its subsidiary, Growblox Life Sciences has filed a patent application for the treatment of chronic pain and heart therapies based on myrcene-containing complex mixtures (MCCM).
The current US opioid epidemic, along with growing public and government concern regarding opioid abuse, makes new pain treatments a promising field of research and development. GB sciences novel pain formulations are also substantially free of delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol (“THC”), which minimizes their potential for abuse. Their current drug discovery efforts were accelerated through the powerful combination of GB Sciences’ proprietary in silico prediction approach, termed the GB Sciences’ Network Pharmacology Platform (“NPP”), and GB Sciences’ proven high-throughput screening techniques using cell-based models. The current provisional patent application covers myrcene-containing complex mixtures capable of targeting the non-traditional cannabinoid receptor, TRPV1.
GB Sciences’s Chief Science Officer, Dr. Andrea Small-Howard said that many cannabis researchers have theorized that the role of terpenes in cannabis-based therapies is to act as so-called ‘Entourage’ components. We show that the TRPV1 receptor is a target for these ‘Entourage’ compounds, a molecular interaction that had previously been demonstrated for several of the cannabinoids. They have demonstrated that beta-myrcene is the most significant of several terpenes derived from the cannabis plant that are capable of activating the TRPV1 receptor. Myrcene, like capsaicin, causes TRPV1 desensitization after prolonged exposure, and should therefore prove useful in treating chronic pain. In creating our novel MCCM mixtures for pain, they have also demonstrated that other terpenes and cannabinoids present in the complex mixture, including those that do not demonstrate significant TRPV1 agonist activity on their own, act in combination to increase the efficacy of myrcene. Unlike other pain medications, they leverage molecular synergies among cannabis-plant compounds to target multiple receptors within pain-sensing neural bundles to increase their combined effectiveness at pain relief.
GB Sciences chairman and CEO, John Poss said that these new chronic pain and heart formulas adhere to GB Science’s strategy of commercializing complex mixtures of cannabis-derived compounds whose pharmaceutical activity does not require THC. Instead, the purified THC is sold as a certified raw ingredient or used in co-branded dispensary products.