Summing up, the professor said that although it is still very early to come to firm predictions, they hope that this discovery will lead to a more targeted chemotherapy method that will significantly reduce patients’ pain.
Binstock and his team described how they used CBD and another agent to activate the TRPV2 protein so that a channel could be opened inside the membranes of liver cancer cells. The team then injected a reduced dose of doxorubicin, a chemical drug, through this channel and directly into the cancer cells. They noted that “doxorubicin-mediated cell death is significantly more potent, requiring an order of magnitude lower dose when co-administered with CBD/CBD.” The team described the results in their journal, Frontiers in Pharmacology.
Explaining further, the professor stated that targeting and eliminating only diseased cancer cells, bypassing healthy ones, is a critical step to reduce patient suffering.
Speaking about the method, Professor Binstock said that most anti-cancer treatments are not optimal enough. While they attack malignant cells in the patient’s body, these methods also tend to attack healthy cells. As a result, chemotherapy leads to multiple side effects of a serious nature.
This method, created by the team, delivers chemotherapy drugs directly to malignant cells, bypassing healthy cells in the body. This means that the newly discovered method may allow doctors to reduce chemotherapy doses for cancer patients. This method can not only improve the overall prognosis of treatment adherence, it can also reduce the side effects associated with chemotherapy.
The method was developed by a group of researchers in Israel led by Professor Alexander Binshtok. The group included researchers from the Hebrew University.
Doctors can reduce chemotherapy doses using CBD (cannabidiol derived from hemp). This discovery has helped patients fight the disease with significantly fewer side effects.
