CBD and Antibiotic Resistance

 

According to the World Health Organization, antibiotic resistant bacteria are one of the greatest threats to global health. Bacteria will gradually become resistant to treatment with antibiotics naturally, but the industrial scale misuse of antibiotics in farming and livestock production has rapidly accelerated the process. A growing number of infections including pneumonia, tuberculosis, gonorrhoea, and salmonellosis are becoming harder to treat as the antibiotics used to treat them become less effective. Ultimately, the potential for infection by antibiotic resistant bacteria could make virtually any surgery too risky to perform.

A study conducted at the University of Queensland in Australia and published in January 2021 in Nature Communications Biology suggests that cannabidiol (CBD), the nonpsychoactive ingredient in marijuana and hemp, may be effective in treating infections by many types of antibiotic resistant bacteria. The results indicated that the cannabinoid is able to penetrate and kill a much wider range of bacteria than previously thought. These include antibiotic resistant strains which have proved difficult to treat in humans. In addition, there is no indication that CBD induces resistance.

The study applied CBD topically to infected pig skin. However, while topical CBD showed great promise, the compound was found to be ineffective when it was injected into mice that had been infected with various bacteria. This is due to the fact that the cannabinoid has a very high tendency to bind to compounds in blood plasma, and is therefore largely unavailable at the systemic level to fight off infections. Fortunately, numerous CBD analogs proved to be equally potent at killing bacteria, leading to renewed hope that it may be possible to create a slightly altered version of the compound with increased systemic availability.

“This is particularly exciting because there have been no new molecular classes of antibiotics discovered and approved since the 1960s, and we can now consider designing new analogs of CBD with improved properties,” explained study author Mark Blaskovich. 

A separate study recently showed that treating strawberries with CBD increases their shelf-life by inhibiting the growth of mold and yeast, further highlighting the compound’s antimicrobial potential.

Further research is needed before CBD can be effectively used to treat bacterial infections but these initial results offer hope that we may be able to develop whole new classes of antibacterial compounds to replace increasingly ineffective antibiotics.