Osteoporosis and Research

Osteoporosis and Research

About Raphael Mechoulam

Raphael Mechoulam (Hebrew: רפאל משולם‎) (born 1930) is an Israeli organic chemist and professor of Medicinal Chemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. Mechoulam is best known for his work (together with Y. Gaoni) in the isolation, structure elucidation and total synthesis of Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol, the main active principle of cannabis and for the isolation and the identification of the endogenous cannabinoids anandamide from the brain and 2-arachidonoyl glycerol (2-AG) from peripheral organs together with his students, postdocs and collaborators.

Transcript: There are many aspects that one can talk about. One is the basic biochemical, pharmacological, scientific aspect of the whole problem. Here we have a new neurotransmitter. A group of compounds that have a huge amount of tasks if we look at the chemically related compound, I made a list of that, these compounds are involved almost all physiological reactions. So many of them, That I think here there is so much work to be done by scientists over the next 20, 30, 40 years. A lot of those compounds are around, some of them bind to the cannabinoid receptors, others are just chemically related and bind to other receptors are involved in many many other things. And I mentioned before, those that bind to the Cb2 receptors are part of a general protective facility, if you wish, in our body like the immune system.

So that is the basic thing, then there is the medical thing, we have to find out how we can use them and what are the diseases we can use these compounds against. And there is a huge number of diseases that can be used against, certain types of cancer, a lot of inflammatory diseases, head traumas, things that I spoke about, diabetes, and so on. So there are many things that can be improved. Bone for example, we just found I had the results last week, bone that is broken, in animals in this case, bone that is broken takes 30% less time to heal if the animal is given a mixture of CBD and THC. Which are essentially the major compounds in marijuana. 30%, that is something that a lot of people can use. I mean almost every young person breaks a bone at some point in his life.

So, why not? Osteoporosis, things like that. So I believe that in addition to the basic science, we shall learn about in medicine as therapeutic drugs. Drug abuse, I don’t think is a major problem.