PORTLAND — An experimental drug made with pure cannabidiol, or CBD, was effective in reducing seizures related to Dravet syndrome, a debilitating form of epilepsy, the drug’s maker announced this week.
The New York Times reports:
GW Pharmaceuticals said the drug, Epidiolex, achieved the main goal of the trial, reducing convulsive seizures when compared with a placebo in patients with Dravet syndrome, a rare form of epilepsy. GW shares more than doubled on Monday.
The company said that patients receiving the drug saw a 39 percent reduction in the frequency of “convulsive seizures” during the trial period, the Times reports.
“I’m very proud and happy about this study because it is science — we did things the way they should be done,” the study’s lead investigator, Dr. Orrin Devinsky of the Comprehensive Epilepsy Center at New York University Langone Medical Center, told the Times. “I would strongly advocate that in the United States we need to do systematic assessments of medical marijuana.”
The results of the trial will prompt GW to request a meeting with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, reports Reuters.
GW was founded in 1998 with the aim of capitalizing on the medical benefits of cannabis, while purifying the active ingredients so as to avoid psychoactive effects.
Its multiple sclerosis treatment Sativex, which is sprayed under the tongue and is distributed by marketing partners, already has regulatory approval in more than 20 countries, although not the United States.
Epidiolex, however, is commercially far more significant since GW retains full control of the product and the company has also geared the medicine’s development to the big U.S. marketplace.
Writer and editor Fred Vogelstein last year spoke with The Oregonian/Oregonlive about his family’s experience with Epidiolex. Vogelstein’s teenage son, Sam, saw a dramatic reduction in the number of seizures he experienced daily while using the drug.
Said Vogelstein:
It’s not a miracle drug in the sense that it only helps half the kids, but those are kids like Sam for whom no other drugs had been previously effective. All the kids in the trials are kids like Sam who have tried every other medicine under the sun unsuccessfully and gotten no relief.
If this drug moved that needle it would make it one of the most important epilepsy drugs ever invented.
