Medical cannabis has been all the rage in the UK of late.
Headlines about two young epilepsy sufferers, Billy Caldwell and Alfie Dingely, who were denied access to cannabis oil that helped keep their conditions under control, sparked a debate that led to the home secretary Sajid Javid's decision to allow medical cannabis to be available on prescription in the UK.
Whilst the wonders of cannabis have been touted for conditions such as cancer and arthritis, relatively little is known about the green leaf and its supposedly magical properties.
That’s where Oxford Cannabinoid Technologies (OCT) comes in. The bio-tech start-up, founded by Kingsley Capital Partners, has been launched in partnership with the University of Oxford to research the potential benefits of the plant.
OCT’s chairman, and managing partner at Kingsley, Neil Mahapatra, became interested in the medical cannabis market after seeing the growth in the UK following its legalisation there.
However, it wasn’t until he lost his mother to lung cancer, that he began to really research the impact cannabis could have on diseases.
“Whilst there is something to suggest cannabis can help with cancer, nowhere near enough research is being done,” he tells the Standard. “Yet, in the regions where cannabis is legal, it is under the guise of having medical benefits.”
Mahapatra, who studied his undergraduate degree in Biology at the University of Oxford, decided to turn to his old biology professor to discuss it. “I said: ‘The medical cannabis market is opening up, no one understands how it works, why don’t we design a research programme with Oxford?”
With that, OCT was born.
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