Immugen Pharma LLC

While practicing medicine in Negril Jamaica in the early 1990s, I made the correlation of the low incidence of HIV in the at-risk population with the widespread use of cannabis that could have been masking its prevalence. Based on this observation I wrote the rationale for an NIH R21 grant to provide an alternative explanation: that cannabinoids improve the barrier function of vaginal tissue by increasing its integrity and thickness to prevent transmission. Data from the grant provided the basis for a patent pending for the use of non-psychoactive derivatives of THC as a non-hormonal treatment of the genitourinary syndrome of menopause that affects 50% of women. Due to the pandemic, we are collaborating with a researcher who is growing nasal tissue and lung tissue to test four different non-psychoactive cannabinoids for their potential to prevent and/or treat Covid-19 by challenging the tissues with a recombinant receptor binding domain portion of the Spike protein and tumor necrosis factor, an inflammatory cytokine that is upregulated by the virus. The most efficacious compound will then be formulated as nasal droplets to be administered to engineered mice or Syrian hamsters who will be exposed to the virus in a BSL-3 laboratory. Discussions are ongoing with generic drug manufacturers.