A new technique developed in Israel uses cannabidiol (CBD) to direct chemotherapy drugs only at cancer cells, potentially making treatment gentler.
Researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, led by Professor Alexander Binshtok, head of the Pain Plasticity Research Group, developed a method delivering chemotherapy directly to malignant cells while bypassing healthy ones. Doctors could potentially use it to reduce chemotherapy doses, easing side effects and making treatment easier for patients to tolerate.
Professor Binshtok said: “Most anticancer treatments are not specific enough: they attack healthy cells alongside the malignant tumors they aim to eliminate. This causes many serious chemotherapy side effects. Eliminating cancer cells without touching healthy ones is an important step toward reducing suffering.”
In Frontiers in Pharmacology, Binshtok and colleagues explained how they used cannabis-derived CBD and an agent targeting TRPV2 protein activation to open a channel in liver cancer cell membranes. Delivering a low dose of doxorubicin directly through this channel, they found substantially stronger malignant cell death when combined with CBD, requiring lower doses.
“It is too early to make concrete predictions, but we hope this discovery leads to a new, more targeted chemotherapy delivery method that greatly reduces patients' pain,” Binshtok said.
Other participating researchers were Hagit Neumann-Raziel, Asaf Shilo, Shaya Lev, Maxim Mogilevsky, Ben Katz, David Shneor, Yoav D. Shaul, Alberto Gabizon, Rotem Karni and Alik Honigman from the Hebrew University, and Andreas Leffler from Hannover Medical School in Germany.
