Researchers at Australia's University of Queensland found that CBD (cannabidiol) could kill a wide range of harmful bacteria, including those responsible for gonorrhea, meningitis and Legionnaires' disease.
The project, conducted jointly by the University of Queensland and Botanix Pharmaceuticals Limited, could enable antibiotic development against increasingly urgent drug-resistant bacteria. For Gram-negative bacteria, resistant disease-causing organisms, no new molecular class has essentially been discovered and approved for clinical use in more than 50 years.
Associate Professor Mark Blaskovich of the university's Institute for Molecular Bioscience said, “This research showed for the first time that CBD kills some Gram-negative bacteria. These bacteria have an extra outer membrane, an additional defense that makes antibiotics harder to penetrate.”
According to Blaskovich, cannabidiol can pierce some bacteria's outer cell membrane, but how it does so is unclear and requires more research. CBD is also effective at breaking down biofilms that help certain bacteria survive antibiotic treatment.
Earlier research had shown that CBD could kill Gram-positive bacteria, including Staphylococcus aureus, responsible for staph infections, and that combining CBD with antibiotics produced stronger effects than antibiotics alone.
Commenting on the results, Botanix president and executive chairman Vince Ippolito said the data showed great potential for developing new, effective treatments. “Our company is preparing to commercialize viable antimicrobial treatments that we hope will reach more patients in the near future. This is a major breakthrough the world needs now,” he said.
The team's research was also published in Communications Biology.
