Research Consistently Showing CBD Has Antibiotic Potential
Researchers have been studying CBD as a potential antibiotic for several years, and the most recent preclinical study at Weill Cornell Medicine continues to confirm the findings of prior research projects.
Researchers found that pure CBD has good antimicrobial activity when tested on MRSA and VISA strains which are resistant to certain antibiotics.
Earlier research had demonstrated that CBD may work as an antibiotic against certain types of bacteria called gram-positive bacteria. Gram-positive bacteria have a variable growth and resistance pattern, making certain strains resistant to antibiotics. The bacteria strains include Staphylococcus aureus which includes MRSA, Streptococcus pneumoniae and Enterococcus faecalis.
The current Weill Cornell Medicine study builds on previous studies. An earlier study was conducted in 2019 at the Center for Superbug Solutions at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience at the University of Queensland in Australia. As we previously reported that study used CBD and two common antibiotics to test and compare their ability to kill bacteria. CBD killed two types of gram-positive bacteria known to cause conditions like skin disease and pneumonia in three hours. The two common antibiotics took 6-8 hours.
A study published in Communications Biology in 2021 found CBD could kill a gram-negative bacteria subset. The current study at Weill Cornell Medicine added to the current knowledge base by finding CBD had at the same or greater effect than vancomycin which is used to treat infections caused by certain types of bacteria. The researchers developed a small molecule library that included CBD as one of the compounds and got a hit on Staphylococcus aureus which is resistant to multiple antibiotics.
Povilas Kavaliauskas, MSc is a research associate at Weill Cornell Medicine.
He said, “As scientists, our goal is to provide the translational preclinical data that could benefit patients and especially those that have extensively drug-resistant infections. We are now seriously investigating CBD as an antimicrobial, and currently, CBD is one of the major hits for our hit-to-lead optimization pipeline.”
This particular study is using in-vivo application in mouse models. Given the wide variety of CBD studies in progress, it is clear that researchers believe CBD has enormous potential as a therapeutic. The compound continues to be misunderstood by many people who confuse it with THC, since both come from the cannabis plant. These research projects are invaluable for helping people understand that CBD is a natural non-psychotic compound that may bring new critical therapies to the world of medicine.
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