Cannabidiol (CBD) in Combination with Conventional Chemotherapy Improves Pancreatic Cancer Survival Rates in Mice
Pancreatic cancer is extremely difficult to treat (1). The five-year survival rate for patients diagnosed with pancreatic cancer has hovered around five percent for the past 40 years or so (1, 2). While a number of gene mutations have been implicated in the etiology of pancreatic cancer (3-6), several studies suggest that the orphan G-coupled receptor GPR55 may be involved in pancreatic and other cancers (7-9). Recently, GPR55 was identified as a cannabinoid receptor in pancreatic islets of Langerhans cells and elsewhere (10). Further, GPR55 agonists have been reported to inhibit tumor and cancer cell functions (11).
At present, pancreatic cancer treatment usually involves combinations of standard chemotherapy drugs such as gemcitabine (GEM) which is the most frequency used agent to treat pancreatic tumors and metastatic pancreatic cancer (12, 13). This, coupled with the cannabinoid-binding properties of GPR55, prompted Ferro et al. (14) to evaluate the effects of combinations of GEM and cannabidiol (CBD), a non-psychoactive cannabinoid found in cannabis in mouse models of pancreatic cancer.
The results from these studies showed that mice treated with a combination of GEM and CBD survived almost three times longer than those treated with GEM alone. While this finding has not yet been tested in human clinical studies, it adds to the emerging body of evidence (15) that cannabinoids may be effective in treating certain types of cancer and other possible life-threatening diseases.
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