US Patent 6630507 - Cannabinoids as Antioxidants and Neuroprotectants

Assignee
The United States of America as represented by the Department of Health and Human Services

Application
No. 09/674028 filed on 02/02/2001

US Patent Issued on October 7, 2003


Examiners
Primary: Weddington, Kevin E.

Attorney, Agent or Firm
Klarquist Sparkman, LLP

Inventors
Hampson, Aidan J.
Axelrod, Julius
Grimaldi, Maurizio


Cannabinoids have been found to have antioxidant properties, unrelated to NMDA receptor antagonism.

This new found property makes cannabinoids useful in the treatment and prophylaxis of wide variety of oxidation associated diseases, such as ischemic, age-related, inflammatory and autoimmune diseases.

The cannabinoids are found to have particular application as neuroprotectants, for example in limiting neurological damage following ischemic insults, such as stroke and trauma, or in the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and HIV dementia. Nonpsychoactive cannabinoids, such as cannabidoil, are particularly advantageous to use because they avoid toxicity that is encountered with psychoactive cannabinoids at high doses useful in the method of the present invention.

A particular disclosed class of cannabinoids useful as neuroprotective antioxidants...
Claims


We claim:

1. A method of treating diseases caused by oxidative stress, comprising administering a therapeutically effective amount of a cannabinoid that has substantially no binding to the NMDA receptor to a subject who has a disease caused by oxidative stress. ...

...Given the excellent absorption of the compounds of the present invention via an inhaled route, the compounds may also be administered as inhalants, for example in pharmaceutical aerosols utilizing solutions, suspensions, emulsions, powders and semisolid preparations of the type more fully described in Remington. ...

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