Marijuana research for Alzheimer's cure stymied.

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Promising new research conducted last year at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies has shown that marijuana extracts may hold a key to treating Alzheimer's disease. The next step: To conduct tests on mice and, if the results are promising, move on to human trials.

Preliminary evidence from the study done on human neurons indicates that tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and other compounds found in cannabis promote the removal of a toxic plaque protein, amyloid beta, found inside neurons in the brains of Alzheimer's patients. It is this plaque that causes inflammation and neuron cell death, contributing to the loss of memory and mental abilities in Alzheimer's patients.

The Salk scientists believe that if they are able to use cannabis compounds to target and attack the buildup of amyloid beta before people start showing the symptoms of the disease, they may be able to stop the cells from making the inflammatory molecules, Schubert said.

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But Salk Institute researchers have run into a major hurdle, and not a scientific one: the federal government. The Salk Institute is based in La Jolla, California — a state that legalized marijuana last November — but it is a federally funded research institute.

Because the Salk institute receives money from the National Institutes of Health, an agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the lab must abide by federal law, which prohibits it from having any unapproved strains of cannabis in its facility without the proper registration.

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The cost to the economy of caring for Alzheimer's and dementia patients was estimated to be about $236 billion in 2016. In 2015 a study funded by the National Institutes of Health estimated that the costs associated with late-stage dementia are greater than for any other disease.

During the last five years of a person with dementia's life, total health-care spending was more than a quarter of a million dollars per person ($287,038), about 57 percent greater than costs associated with death from other diseases, including cancer ($173,383) and heart disease ($175,136).

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Currently, there are just five prescription medications approved for use in the United States, which aim to slow down the worsening of symptoms in people with Alzheimer's, but they have proved to only be effective in some people and for a limited period of time. Schubert contends that the pharmaceutical lobby in Washington, D.C., is part of the problem. "The pharmaceutical companies want to stop the use of cannabis in the research community because it's a natural product, so it can't be patented," he said. "That's the reason they don't have any incentive to use it (cannabis) in the development of new drugs. They can't make money on it, so they are against it."

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Salk researchers believe the reason so many Alzheimer's drugs are failing may be explained by the widely held belief in the scientific community that simply removing or preventing the accumulation of amyloid plaques that occur outside of the brain's cell can help alleviate some of the symptoms of dementia. But the scientists at the Salk lab believe that this is the wrong approach.

"They are trying to use antibodies to get rid of plaque that is outside the cell, but that is too late in the disease," Schubert said. By the time the plaque has developed, the damage to the patient's brain cells may already be too extensive. "What we are trying to do is get rid of the plaque amyloid protein while it is still inside the cell, at a much earlier stage in the progression of the disease," Schubert said.

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So far, all requests for a removal or rescheduling of the marijuana plant to a Schedule II or III drug have been denied. The DEA denied two of the latest petitions last August, stating that the CSA mandates that scheduling decisions be based on medical, scientific and other data showing the relative abuse potential of a drug.

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