Recent Study Says: Cannabidiol Inhibits SARS-CoV-2 Replication

A second paper was just published about how cannabis could potentially protect your cells from being infected by the COVID-19 virus.

Published by Science Advances on January 20th, 2022 to read more click here.

This paper focuses on CBD and CBD's ability to prevent the virus from replicating once it’s inside your cell. This is different from the last paper that had highlighted CBD-A and CBG-A and that paper was claiming that those compounds can actually prevent the spike protein from binding to the ace receptor meaning that virus can’t get into your cell. This paper describes the virus is going to get into your cell but once the virus is in your cell, that’s when CBD does its magic.

Once that virus is in your cell, the virus needs to be able to replicate by making viral RNA that’s going to code for things like the spike protein, the membrane protein and the nucleocapsid. When CBD was present in the cell with the virus it was able to essentially eliminate the expression of that viral RNA inside the host cell. Some of the changes that were induced when the virus was in the cell reversed when the CBD was present. How does this happen?

Essentially, the researchers took CBD and CBD-V (CBD-V is NOT active against COVID) and they looked at what gene changes they saw between the two. CBD was able to activate a gene that its purpose was to respond to stress. Part of that stress response is preventing things that aren’t supposed to be in the cell like a virus, from replicating and producing that RNA. They also found that CBD caused changes in your innate immune system, the immune system that you were born with. They found a component of your innate immune system is suppressed when you’re exposed to COVID infections. However, the CBD was able to reactive your innate immune system which can work better at fighting against that virus.

This data is not just in a test tube, they also did animal studies to confirm these results. All together this data is super promising to move onto clinical studies and study how effective CBD could be in humans at preventing the COVID-19 infection.