A news report out of London, England and Toronto, Canada indicates that Jamaican women are likely first in line to benefit from new discoveries that found medical cannabis formulations are 100 per cent effective in killing breast cancer (HER2+) cells.
The long sought after cure for breast cancer could come from a combination of medical cannabis formulations developed by Apollon Jamaica and medicinal mushroom formulations developed by AI Pharmaceuticals Jamaica.
The news was heralded by two international pharmaceutical companies with subsidiaries in Jamaica – United Kingdom-based Apollon Formularies and Aion Therapeutic, based in British Columbia, Canada, according to PRNewswire.
Jamaica’s Paul Burke, the prominent People’s National Party (PNP) stalwart, is chairman of Apollon Jamaica and CEO is American physician Dr Stephen Barnhill who is trained in laboratory medicine and certified by the American Board of Bioanalysis.
Barnhill owns 49 per cent of the shares. Under Jamaica’s Cannabis Licensing Authority (CLA), the company must be majority owned by Jamaicans, giving Burke and nine other local investors a 51 per cent stake.
“The testing results showed that Apollon Jamaica’s medical cannabis formulations were particularly effective in killing living HER2+ cancer cells directly, while Aion’s medicinal mushroom formulations were most effective in stimulating the immune system’s T-cell production to attack and kill HER2+ cancer cells,” the announcement said.
“When the two formulations were combined, nearly 100 per cent of HER2+ breast cancer cells in 3D cell cultures were killed through the three different pathways: direct cell cytotoxicity, immune stimulated T-cell cytotoxicity, and macrophage-induced phagocytosis,” PRNewswire reported.
