Cannabis-based epilepsy drug 'promising'
15 Oct 2014
Children with treatment-resistant epilepsy have been prescribed a cannabidiol drug in clinical trials conducted in the US.
Biopharmaceuticals firm GW Pharmaceuticals has published data that suggests its investigational cannabidiol product candidate, Epidiolex, has been successfully administered to 58 children and young adults who suffer from treatment-resistant epilepsy such as Dravet syndrome.
Dravet syndrome is a rare brain dysfunction that causes sufferers to develop several types of seizures which can be triggered by stress, light or illness.
“I believe these data fully support advancing into formal clinical development
Dr. Elizabeth Thiele
The new treatment, which was trialled earlier this year for a period of at least 12 weeks, produced encouraging results with 40-70% of patients obtaining a greater than 50% reduction in seizure frequency.
According to reports, the most common adverse side-effects were sleepiness and fatigue.
Elizabeth Thiele, director of the paediatric epilepsy programme at Massachusetts General Hospital, said preliminary results gathered from the ’open-label’ study of Epidiolex were encouraging.
“Based on my experience thus far, I believe that Epidiolex has the potential to be an important advance in treatment for these treatment-resistant children and will likely have a significant role as a future therapy,” Thiele said.
“I believe these data fully support advancing into formal clinical development, and we are very excited to participate with GW [Pharmaceuticals] in the upcoming placebo-controlled trials in Dravet and Lennox-Gastaut syndromes.”
Justin Gover, GW Pharmaceuticals’ chief executive officer, said that data accumulated from a further 93 patients treated with Epidiolex was consistent with the levels of efficacy found in the initial study.
“We believe that these signals of efficacy, together with the side effect profile observed to date, serve to reinforce our confidence in Epidiolex,” Gover said.
