Coronavirus and handwashing: Can cannabis help kill bacteria?

US state authorities have deemed cannabis companies to be "essential" during the coronavirus pandemic and have allowed them to keep their doors open. Now some of these companies are producing a product vital to help combat COVID-19: hand sanitizer.

From Hawaii to the east coast, these companies are using cannabis production processes to manufacture and donate disinfecting gels to local hospitals to curb the spread of the coronavirus. What's more, it seems they can do so without significant costs or substantial changes in their production processes.

Cannabis producers frequently use large amounts of ethanol (ethyl alcohol) to make extractions of all kinds, so many companies have a large stock of this substance in their warehouses. It is also used to produce liquor at distilleries, and is the main ingredient in disinfectants that destroy the structures of microbes, such as viruses and bacteria, on hands.

If we add to this that some cannabinoids –such as CBD and CBG– have powerful antibacterial properties, mixing them with alcohol produces a product that not only disinfects your hands from many microorganisms, but also helps protect your immune system. We explain how:

CBD could be the antibiotic of the future

Cannabidiol, the main non-psychoactive cannabinoid extracted from cannabis plants, is a compound that is already accepted in different countries for the treatment of a form of epilepsy (with drugs such as Epidiolex), and is being studied to alleviate another series of other medical pathologies. While there is data to suggest that cannabidiol can also kill bacteria, its potential as an antibiotic had not been fully investigated. Until now.

Scientists in Australia have discovered that cannabidiol eliminated all the strains of certain bacteria that they tested in a laboratory, including some that are highly resistant to existing antibiotics. Moreover, the bacteria did not become resistant to CBD after being exposed for 20 days, the period during which they can withstand some medications that are currently used.

The Australian team tested it with a group of bacteria called gram-positive; those that are dark blue (or violet) in a Petri dish. These included Staphylococcus aureus, which causes skin infections around sores, ulcers, and open wounds (especially from poor hospital hygiene); and Streptococcus pneumoniae, which causes pneumonia; as well as E. faecalis, which can be life-threatening in people with a weakened immune system, as it is a bacterium that has the ability to develop a resistance to virtually every antibiotic in use.

work, overseen by Dr Mark Blaskovich of the Institute for Molecular Bioscience at the University of Queensland, in collaboration with Botanix Pharmaceuticals Ltd., a company that conducts research into the topical uses of synthetic cannabidiol, found that CBD was remarkably effective in killing a wide range of these gram-positive bacteria, including strains of staphylococci and streptococcal bacteria present in the throat and on the skin.

"Given the documented anti-inflammatory effects of cannabidiol, the safety data from human trials, and the potential of various routes of administration, CBD is a very promising new antibiotic that warrants further research," concluded Dr Blaskovich, the director of the study, in an interview in Newsweek. "The combination of its inherent antimicrobial activity and potential to reduce damage caused by the inflammatory response of infections is particularly attractive."

Resistance to bacteria, a growing problem

Importantly, the drug tested (a synthetic CBD compound) remained effective against bacteria that have become highly resistant to the common antibiotics created to kill them, making infections difficult or impossible to treat. Cannabidiol did not lose effectiveness under conditions of prolonged exposure that produce resistance against vancomycin and daptomycin, two of the most widely used antibiotics. CBD also proved effective against bacterial biofilms, which form when bacteria secrete proteins to form films on the skin's surface, which can also cause difficult-to-treat infections.

"To be really useful, it would be nice if we could show that it also works on systemic infections; for example, other types of pneumonia, or complicated tissue infections, where it must be administered orally or intravenously," says the Australian researcher.

The findings were presented at the annual American Society for Microbiology (ASM Microbe 2019) conference in San Francisco. It is necessary to stress that the work is in its early stages, and that CBD only works with gram-positive bacteria. In fact, it is not effective against gram-negative bacteria (which do not stain dark blue, but rather a light pink), against which it is especially difficult to develop new antibiotics, because they feature a highly selective outer membrane that prevents most drugs from entering the bacterial cell.

So, those of you who may view this study as an excuse to forego current antibiotics and use cannabis-based home remedies instead should forget about this idea. Most of what has been shown in this study has been demonstrated in test tubes. "It would be very dangerous to treat a serious infection with cannabidiol instead of conventional antibiotics," emphasised Dr Blaskovich, who concluded that many more studies will be needed to see whether CBD could be used as an antibiotic in people in the future.