The majority of pharmaceutical and academic research & development activities investigating the physiological and disease fighting properties of cannabis revolves around the understanding of one class of biologically active ingredients, the cannabinoids. In the 1960s, several interesting compounds were isolated from the cannabis plant. While there are over 90 different cannabinoids, the two most well-known and studied compounds in the cannabis plant also happen to be the two that occur in the largest quantity: Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol (“THC”) and cannabidiol (“CBD”).
Biosynthesis is the process of genetically modifying an organism to produce a pharmaceutically bioactive compound that it otherwise would not normally make. Manufacturing of pharmaceutical grade cannabinoids remains a challenge, especially for those that are found in only trace amounts in the cannabis plant but nevertheless may hold very important physiological benefits in humans. InMed recognized that having a reliable source of pure, pharmaceutical-grade starting materials for its products that are bio-identical to the compounds found in nature would be a critical success factor for our drug development strategy.
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Finding novel ways to treat and cure diseases is a fundamental challenge in biomedical research. There is a lack of reliable drug target prediction methods as reflected by the low clinical target validation success rate. Therefore, new bioinformatics approaches are required to accurately predict drug targets for a disease. Novel drug targets refer to unexploited targets that can be used for developing first-in-class drugs and combination therapies. Network-based methods have been developed for identification of unknown disease-associated genes.