- An executive holds the Syqe inhaler at the company’s office in a Tel Aviv industrial complex. In the background is an empty floor room being readied to produce the first models.
- Josh Mitnick for The Wall Street Journal
Doctor-prescribed joints might one day become a relic of the past if cannabis technology venture Syqe Medical Ltd. has its way.
The government backed start-up, an outgrowth of Israel’s ecosystem of state-sanctioned medical marijuana prescriptions and research, has developed a hand-held inhaler that vaporizes tiny granules of cannabis in doses as small as 1 milligram to give medical professionals more control over treatment.
Despite a growing number of users in an expanding list of territories and countries, medical marijuana still struggles for mainstream acceptance in part because doctors have never been able to fine tune doses like they are used to with pharmaceutical drugs, leaving most patients to trial and error with cannabis cigarettes, vaporizers and edibles.
The Syqe Inhaler is developed to give doctors and patients the tools to hone in on a sweet spot for medical users by delivering enough cannabis chemicals for pain relief while avoiding the mind altering “high” that impairs normal functioning.
“We are directly manipulating the human psyche in a very precise manner,” said Syqe Medical founder and chief executive Perry Davidson. “A physician could prescribe a custom-tailored, individualized treatment for that patient, and not have a hit or a miss, but a very close hit on the accurate dosing that the patient required.”
Mr. Davidson helped found Israel’s first state-sanctioned grower of medical cannabis several years ago, and has watched usage take off as the country caught up with the U.S. With more than 20,000 publicly sanctioned users, Israel is one of several countries outside the U.S. where usage of medical cannabis is growing and publicly funded research is flourishing.
- Cannabis granules produced for the inhaler (L) along side regular cannabis buds (R).
- Josh Mitnick for The Wall Street Journal
Israel, Mr. Davidson said, is at the “forefront” of medicinal marijuana. Like the U.S, regulators are looking for a reliable, standardized method to apply a drug they know works.
Israeli health officials are following Syqe Medical’s progress, and Mr. Davidson says they are eager to bring the inhalers into local hospitals for pilot testing — a milestone the company hopes to reach by the end of the year. Israel’s Chief Scientists office has already provided some $1 million in R&D stipends over the last three years.
The palm sized inhaler has a round cartridge loaded with cannabis granules. The inhaler requires a fraction of the cannabis normally prescribed on a monthly basis, and it puts the drug into a form that’s more difficult to resell on the black market for a profit, Mr. Davidson says.
A Israeli clinical study on the inhaler published in the September issue of Journal of Pain and Palliative Care Pharmacology was upbeat. The device, which still needs further testing, is described as “a pharmaceutical method for cannabis dosing, adding a much needed treatment in the limited armamentarium of effective therapies for the management of chronic pain,” wrote Elon Eisenberg, director of the Pain Unit at Haifa’s Rambam Hospital, in the journal.
Before the device makes it to Israeli hospitals, Syqe Medical hopes to raise from $10 to $15 million, some of it from investors in the U.S., which it considers its main market in the future. The company cited research which predicts the market in the U.S. will grow by eight times to reach $10 billion in the next five years.
“We see it as a challenge,’’ said Mr. Davidson. “If we can unlock it…we believe that we can finally bring cannabis as a mainstream drug, and have physicians be comfortable using it.”
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(via WSJ Blogs)
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