Chemotherapy, as we all know, is a popular anti-cancer treatment. But high doses and prolonged treatment might impose various side-effects on the patients. CBD has recently been established as a viable alternative for reducing chemotherapy doses. If this discovery is properly channelled, it holds the potential of fighting this deadly disease while bringing down chances of side-effects.
A team of Israeli researchers working under Professor Alexander Binshtok had come up with this method. The team comprised of Asaf Shilo, Shaya Lev, Hagit Neumann-Raziel, Yoav D. Shaul, Maxim Mogilevsky, Rotem Karni, Ben Katz, Yoav D. Shaul, Alik Honigman, David Shneor and Alberto Gabizon from the Hebrew University. It also included Andreas Leffler, a researcher working at Germany’s Hannover Medical School.
Professor Alexander Binshtok had been working as Jerusalem’s Hebrew University’s Pain Plasticity Research Group Head. He along with his brilliant team members have come up with a method which bypasses the healthy cells and delivers the chemo drugs to the malignant ones directly. This newly-discovered method holds the potential of lowering down the doses administered on cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy.
Apart from diminishing the associated side effects, it can also bring considerable improvements to both treatment compliance and overall prognosis. Prof. Binshtok revealed that most of the anti-cancer treatments are guilty of attacking the healthy cells present in a patient’s body while trying to take down the malignant ones. This causes various serious side effects. Prof. Binshtok wishes to reduce the same by targeting and eliminating just the affected ones.
He and his entire team had activated TRPV2 protein by making the use of CBD and another agent. This in turn helped to open a canal inside the liver cancer cell membranes. A reduced dose of popular chemo drug doxorubicin was then inserted by the team directly into the cancer cells through this canal. The team had revealed that “doxorubicin-mediated cell death is significantly more potent, requiring an order of magnitude lower dose, when co-applied with CBD.”
All of their findings from the study have been listed in their journal named Frontiers in Pharmacology. This discovery holds massive potential of bringing a paradigm shift in the field of medical science. Prof. Binshtok thinks that it is still too early to come to a solid conclusion. But he is hopeful that it can reduce the pain experienced by patients with a more targeted chemo treatment method.
