In 2008 a first of its kind study conducted by a team of British and Italian researchers had already found that one of the world’s most commonly cultivated plants could stop MRSA in its tracks: marijuana.
Specifically, the team tested five of marijuana’s most common cannabinoids against six different MRSA strains of “clinical relevance”, including epidemic EMRSA strains, which are the ones responsible for hospital outbreaks. They found that every single one of the cannabinoids tested showed “potent activity” against a wide variety of the bacteria.
Cannabinoids are substances unique to the cannabis plant that have wide-ranging medicinal properties: they fight cancer, reverse inflammation and act as powerful antioxidants. Now we know that they are also some of the most powerful antibiotics on earth.
“Everything points towards these compounds having been evolved by the plants as antimicrobial defenses that specifically target bacterial cells,” said Simon Gibbons, one of the authors of the study and head of the Department of Pharmaceutical and Biological Chemistry at the University College London School of Pharmacy, in a follow up interview in the MIT Technological Review.
Amazingly, the cannabinoids even showed “exceptional activity” against a strain of the MRSA that had developed extra proteins for increased resistance to antibiotics, showing that cannabis remained effective despite the bacteria’s adaptations.
“The actual mechanism by which they kill the bugs is still a mystery…” said Gibbons. “I really cannot hazard a guess how they do it, but their high potency as antibiotics suggests there must be a very specific mechanism.”
The researchers recommend cannabis as the source of new and effective antibiotic products that can be used in institutional settings right now.
“The most practical application of cannabinoids would be as topical agents to treat ulcers and wounds in a hospital environment, decreasing the burden of antibiotics,” said Giovanni Appendino, a professor at Italy’s Piemonte Orientale University and co-author of the study.
Since two of the most potently antibacterial cannabinoids were not psychoactive at all and appear in abundance in the common and fast-growing hemp plant, producing the antibiotics of the future could be quick and simple.
“What this means is, we could use fiber hemp plants that have no use as recreational drugs to cheaply and easily produce potent antibiotics,” Appendino concluded.
From: Marijuana: The Super Antibiotic Of The Future By: Reset.me
