A clinical-stage pharmaceutical company in Israel is preparing to launch a study on a proprietary cannabinoid-based epilepsy treatment.
Tel Aviv-based SciSparc on Wednesday announced an agreement with The Sheba Fund for Health Services and Research to conduct a pre-clinical study to evaluate the SCI-210 drug development program.
In February, SciSparc announced the next trial phase for a cannabinoid-based treatment for Alzheimer’s disease.
SCI-210 is SciSparc’s proprietary formulation of cannabidiol (CBD) and palmitoylethanolamide (PEA) for treating status epilepticus (SE).
SE is a seizure that lasts longer than five minutes, or more than one seizure within five minutes, without returning to a normal level of consciousness between episodes.
SciSparc says that timely treatment is necessary with SE to avoid neurological sequela.
Permanent brain damage and death can result from SE if the seizure does not respond to conventional drug treatment.
SciSparc’s pending pre-clinical study will focus on the advantages of SCI-210’s proprietary CBD/PEA combination by utilizing the entourage effect.
“We are very excited for the opportunity to continue testing our proprietary innovative drug candidate SCE-210 and are encouraged by the potential of the study to exhibit increased safety and efficacy over CBD alone in the treatment of status epilepticus,” says SciSparc CTO Adi Zuloff-Shani, Ph.D. “Due to the unique mechanism of action of SCI-210, we believe that it has the potential of reducing adverse effects associated with high-dose CBD-rich treatments and subsequently making a meaningful difference for patients.”
In 2018, G.W. Pharmaceuticals received FDA approval for Epidiolex, a CBD-based formulation for treating symptoms of Dravet Syndrome and Lennox-Gastaut Syndrome.
Using mice, SciSparc researchers will compare the effect of SCI-210 to single CBD treatment in animal models of SE.
SciSparc says that SCI-210 formulation has previously demonstrated its efficacy compared to CBD alone in an in-vitro hepatocytes model of fat accumulation.
According to SciSparc, the PEA enhanced CBD’s effect and required the effective concentration of CBD to be lowered.
SciSparc aims to again demonstrate SCI-210’s potentially-superior efficacy over CBD alone on SE as well as associated cognitive sequelae.
In addition to the SCI-210 study, SciSparc is conducting cannabinoid therapy studies on Tourette syndrome, obstructive sleep apnea, pain, and autism spectrum disorder treatments.
