There are so many studies showing how cannabis may be an effective treatment for cancer. It has so much potential in this area it’s unreal, and this potential has been shown by studies that have been published for the past few decades. When a pharmaceutical pill shows half as much promise as cannabis does, clinical trials are set up right away, but why have there been no cannabis/cancer clinical trials yet? That’s probably because big pharma would lose a lot of money, the same way that they would lose a lot if more people decided to grow their own cannabis under the ACMPR program, if you live in Canada.

Penn State College of Medicine researchers  have released a new study that shows cannabinoid compounds may actually inhibit the growth of colon cancer cells in the lab.

The researchers tested cannabinoid compounds on colon cancer cells in an experiment in test tubes, and 10 of them were effective at inhibiting cancer cell growth.

Kent Vrana, chair of the Department of Pharmacology at Penn State College of Medicine, said the study — recently published in Cannabis and Cannabinoid Research — helped identify compounds that could be tested further to understand their anti-cancer properties.

“Now that we’ve identified the compounds that we think have this activity, we can take these compounds and start trying to alter them to make them more potent against cancer cells,” Vrana said. “And then eventually, we can explore the potential for using these compounds to develop drugs for treating cancer.”

They tested how 370 different synthetic cannabinoid compounds affected seven types of human colon cancer cells. Do do this, they incubated the cancer cells in a lab for eight hours before treating them with the cannabis compounds for 48 hours.

“The 10 compounds we found to be effective fall into three classes, so they’re similar to each other but with small changes,” Vrana said. “We know how one of them works, which is by inhibiting the division of cells in general. We also found that the most potent and effective compounds don’t seem to work through traditional marijuana receptors, although we’re not sure of the exact mechanism yet.”

You can read the entire press release here for more details.