What’s Behind the FDA’s Support for CBD for Opioid Addiction?

Neurobiologist Yasmin Hurd, of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, is a principal investigator for one of Ananda’s clinical studies using Nantheia ATL5, and she spoke recently with the National Institutes of Health on the research strategy behind the FDA’s approval of the Investigational New Drug (IND).

Hurd has been researching the components of cannabis and their effect on brain development for 20 years. Initial animal research indicated that early exposure to THC could negatively affect opioid sensitivity later in life. But the same experiments using CBD showed a very different effect.

Rats given CBD, in fact, were less likely to seek heroin when environmental cues would otherwise have triggered a craving. And these effects on craving lasted for a long time, indicating that CBD had actually changed something in the rats’ brains.

“Addiction is a disorder of craving,” Hurd explains, “Many psychological, social, and environmental factors perpetuate an insidious cycle of drug use….People relapse for a reason, and it’s usually environmental cues like anxiety and social triggers that affect craving,”

While scientists are unclear as to how exactly CBD works in the brain, Hurd’s research found that CBD normalized some of the faulty communications between nerve cells that heroin has been shown to cause. These faulty communications occur in the part of the brain involved in controlling reward, motivation, and goal-directed behaviors.

Even with the urgent need for opioid addiction treatments, pharmaceutical companies have been slow to put money into finding treatments for opioid use disorder, “something that really pains me, given the desperate need to treat so many people suffering from this disorder.” Hurd credits the NIH HEAL Initiative with sparking interest in pursuing new, unconventional approaches to treatment.

So how will Ananda’s “Liquid Structure” CBD-based drug differ from Epidiolex? Nantheia ATL5 makes use of a new, highly bioavailable form of CBD that is essentially water-soluble, allowing for a much higher degree of absorption. The CBD is enclosed in a soft gel capsule and dosed with 100mg CBD each.

Receiving IND status from the FDA is a huge milestone for Ananda Scientific and the researchers that have been working to get this drug into clinical trials. If the results of the upcoming clinical trials bear out the early research, Nantheia ATL5 could become the second CBD pharmaceutical to have full FDA approval.

More importantly, though, it could provide hope to the hundreds of thousands of people globally that are working to heal from opioid addiction.