Cannabidiol is a chemical that’s extracted from the hemp plant, and it has taken the world by storm. While people often confuse hemp with its illicit cousin marijuana, they differ in one critical way. The 2018 Farm Bill legalized industrial hemp, defining it as cannabis with less than 0.3% THC. It is the chemical responsible for marijuana’s psychoactive high.
CBD takes the cake in other ways. Said to be chock-full of medicinal properties, it is used to help manage a variety of ailments, ranging from chronic pain and high blood pressure to anxiety. Unfortunately, there’s limited scientific evidence to back a lot of these claims.
The only instance where CBD was scientifically proven to be medicinal is Epidiolex, a CBD-based drug that’s used to treat seizures. In June 2018, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Epidiolex to treat seizures brought on by two rare and hard to treat pediatric epilepsies, Dravet Syndrome and Lennox-Gastaut Syndrome.
The drug is manufactured by British company GW Pharmaceuticals, and according to CEO Justin Gover, people are loving the drug. In the fourth quarter of 2019, GW made $104 million in net sales, making a total of $296 million across the globe in the first year it has been on the market.
“It’s an incredible launch year for any medication, and that, I think, proves that this medicine is really making a difference to patients. It shows real value to the health care system and sets us up, I think, in a very nice way for what should be another great year for us in 2020,” says Gover
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were about 3.4 million Americans diagnosed with epilepsy in 2015. The two conditions that Epidiolex was approved to treat are even rarer, and the patients, most aged two years and older, can suffer from multiple seizures every day.
“It’s a new mechanism to treat epilepsy. We’re obviously testing very high need patients, they’re having many seizures a day. So the ability to provide a real advance in this therapeutic area, together with the fact that this is the first-ever cannabis product approved by the FDA, has together created, I think, an exceptional environment for us to commercialize this product,” Justin Gover revealed.
Last year, GW Pharma received approval from the European Union to market Epidiolex in 28 European countries. The company stated that it would roll out the product in France, Germany and the United Kingdom in the fourth quarter of 2019, followed by Spain and Italy this year.
Industry experts believe that the success of Epidiolex is likely to be celebrated by CBD companies like Willow Biosciences Inc. (TSX: WLLW) (OTCQB: CANSF) since the drug provides proof that cannabidiol has therapeutic attributes.
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