The University of Mississippi will be home to a new center designed to help researchers nationwide address challenges that hamper research into therapeutic uses for cannabis.
The Resource Center for Cannabis and Cannabinoid Research, also known as R3CR, will operate in the National Center for Natural Products Research. The center is supported by a grant partnership led by the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health. It will provide cannabis research information through an interactive website, webinars, seed funding and conferences. This will help researchers generate more science-backed evidence.
Over the next five years, the resource center will allow more researchers to enter the field of cannabis research, said Donald Stanford, assistant director of the Research Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences., the Ole Miss institute that oversees the natural products center. And those scientists will likely realize a significant improvement in the quality of their work, he said.
Through a collaborative agreement with the National Institutes of Health, NCNPR will lead the partnership with Washington State University and the United States Pharmacopoeia to provide guidance on regulations, quality standards and best practices.
The NIH partners include the National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institute on Aging and National Cancer Institute. All have a shared interest of developing standard methods for scientific investigations into possible therapeutic effects of compounds found in the Cannabis sativa plant.
The resource center will comprise three scientific core groups that have specialized responsibilities and activities: a regulatory guidance core, a research support core and a research standards core.
The regulatory guidance core will be led by Mahmoud ElSohly, research professor in the natural products center and longtime director of the UM Marijuana Project. The group will serve as a clearinghouse for rules and regulations from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration that affect cannabis research.
Robert Welch, director of the National Center for Cannabis Research and Education at UM, will join ElSohly in helping interpret regulations.
Mary Paine, professor of pharmaceutical sciences at WSU, will lead the research support core. This part of the resource center will disseminate scientific and regulatory information, organize workshops and conferences and administer seed funding grants to cannabis researchers nationwide.
Nandakumara Sarma, director of dietary supplements and herbal medicines at USP, will lead the research standards core that will provide best practices and technical information guidance.
The new resource center aims to work with a broad range of people and organizations engaged in studying cannabis. These include scientists, federal and state agencies, institutional administrators and suppliers of research materials.
