NHS cannabis for kids ‘by 2019’
. . . that’s the astonishing claim made by UK’s biggest legal refiner of drug that could help thousands of young epileptics
CANNABIS oil from a specially bred strain of the plant could be available to epileptic children on the NHS as early as next year.
US drugs regulators are expected to approve the use of Epidiolex on Wednesday and GW Pharma, the British manufacturer of the drug, believes the European Medicines Agency will follow suit in months.
That would pave the way for thousands of children like Alfie Dingley, six, and Billy Caldwell, 12, to be prescribed it on the NHS to help control their seizures.
Justin Gover, chief executive of GW Pharma, told The Mail on Sunday: ‘ We hope by this time next year that Epidiolex will be approved on the NHS.’
He esti mates i t could help between 4,000 and 5,000 people with epilepsy in the UK – about half of them children.
Mr Gover said three major studies had confirmed the effectiveness and safety of Epidiolex for two types of ‘childhood onset’ epilepsy. Given that, he believed there was ‘a realistic chance that the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence will conduct a quick review’ and approve it for NHS use.
Epidiolex is made from a strain of cannabis grown legally under a Home Office licence in huge greenhouses near Wissington, Norfolk.
The strain has high concentrations of cannabidiol (CBD) which works as an anticonvulsant, but less than 0.1 per cent of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the psychoactive compound that gives cannabis smokers their high but which also raises the risk of psychosis.
There is no clinical evidence that THC helps prevent fits, said Mr Gover, who claimed that children were being put at risk by some unregulated cannabis oils that contain much higher levels of THC than stated on the label.
He also said it was unnecessary to legalise cannabis in order to develop pharmaceutical- quality medicines derived from the plant.
‘There seems to be this theory that the only way to get cannabis medicines is through legalisation of cannabis,’ he said. ‘But that simply isn’t true.’
More than half of America’s 50 states have legalised cannabis for medicinal reasons, meaning people with a doctor’s note can obtain the dried plant from ‘dispensaries’. But Mr Gover said it would be better to isolate cannabis compounds and test them in clinical trials rather than hand out cannabis whole.
‘If it’s possible to develop medicines [from cannabis] that adhere to pharmaceutical standards then we believe patients will be better served by that approach,’ he said.
Tory MP Simon Hoare last night warned that lobbyists calling for the legalisation of cannabis for recreational reasons could be using the highly emotive cases of Billy Caldwell and Alfie Dingley for their own ends.
He said it was vital that the ‘medical debate’ and the ‘broader debate’ were examined separately.