Tilray pot products to carry Sandoz branding

TORONTO • Three months after announcing a deal with cannabis grower Tilray Inc., generic drug major Sandoz Canada Inc. has signed off on the use of its name for marijuana products.

On Tuesday, the company, a subsidiary of Novartis one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, announced that eight of Tilray’s non-combustible products, already sold under Canada’s mail-order medical marijuana system, would start carrying Sandoz branding.

“We think it’s going to bring a lot of credibility to the product, vis-a-vis the patients and the physicians and the pharmacists. Sandoz is an old brand, it’s well-known in the Canadian market. We fill over 50 million prescriptions a year with Sandoz products,” said Michel Robidoux, president and general manager of Sandoz Canada.

The partnership is the first significant foray by an established pharmaceutical company into Canada’s medical marijuana market. Licensed producer CannTrust Holdings Inc.

is working to develop products alongside generic drug company Apotex Inc., but the two companies have yet to bring co-branded products to market.

At this early stage, the Tilray-Sandoz partnership is mostly a sales exercise, with Sandoz Canada lending its name, national sales force and clout with regulators to Tilray’s product slate. Robidoux said Sandoz Canada could take a more active role in research and development. “We need to review all of the current studies or research that they’ve done, and then (we’ll see) where do we move from there,” he said.

Over the past few years the number of registered medical marijuana patients in Canada has increased rapidly. At the end of December, there were nearly 270,000 patients registered with Health Canada.

Research, however, has not kept pace with interest in the drug as a treatment for illnesses ranging from insomnia to epilepsy.

Ultimately it will be research, more than branding, that helps marijuana become a mainstream medical product, said Marc Wayne, chief executive of Canopy Health Innovations Inc., a subsidiary of Canopy Growth Corp. that focuses on developing clinical products.

“It’s easy to put out a product in a capsule form and sell it,” said Wayne. “You’re not answering the other part of the equation, which is what doctors really want, which is how much of that consistent dose should I be giving my patients, in what levels, how many times a day, and what ratio of different cannabinoids should I be giving them and for what particular indication.”

Canadian cannabis companies are still several years away from getting the goahead from Health Canada to make health claims for marijuana products, said Wayne. That requires several stages of testing, including large-scale clinical trials.

Much of the early-stage testing for product safety can be skipped, said Wayne. “Because it’s been used for many years with many thousands of people … that eliminates a large part of the preclinical work,” he said.