Vireo Health teams with Ligand on cannabis delivery methods

Article by Omar Sacirbay – mjbizmagazine

As an emergency room physician and the founding CEO of Vireo Health, a multistate marijuana company based in Minnesota, Kyle Kingsley had thought extensively about how cannabinoids could replace opioids for pain relief.
So, in 2015, when Vireo’s then-chief technology officer told Kingsley that he had a friend at Ligand Pharmaceuticals, a well-established California drug developer with several U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved medicines on the market, the CEO asked him to set up a meeting to discuss collaborating.

“It’s one of the first overt instances (that I’m aware of) of a cannabis company working with quote-unquote big pharma,” Kingsley said. “For us, this was just really about a new line of products and figuring out new ways to make cannabis more effective.”

How It Came to Be
Kingsley was specifically interested in Ligand’s drug Captisol, a modified version of cyclodextrin, a chemical compound that improves the solubility, stability and bioavailability of other drugs, thereby improving how those medicines are delivered in humans. Kingsley believed Captisol could enhance the cannabinoid-based medicines that Vireo was developing.

“We looked into the chemistry of what they were doing with Captisol, and it was a well-established FDA agent in a wide array of medicines,” Kingsley said. “It made a lot of sense to us to explore opportunities. I’m an ER doc by training, so I’m always interested in finding new paths for cannabinoids, and I was interested in potentially applying this intravenously. You go into the emergency room and—instead of getting an IV of morphine—you’d get an IV of cannabinoids in the future.” Continue the article on Cannabis delivery Methods here