The Utah state legislature last year appropriated a few hundred thousand dollars to start the new Cannabis Research Centerthat will be based at University of Utah Health. Bruce Bugbee, professor of crop physiology at Utah State University helped spearhead the collaboration with the University of Utah.
“This is such an exciting synergism for botanical medicines between the agriculture school and medical school,” Bugbee said.
Bugbee is leading the team of USU researchers who are growing pharmaceutical grade cannabis for the research. They will produce high quality products that can be used in clinical trials with patients.
“This is direct human consumption so they can’t have any heavy metals and in particular, the fungal counts in the product have to be very low. That’s easy to understand, food products need to be safe, they are regulated by the FDA,” Bugbee said.
In fact, Bugbee has been leading cannabis research in Utah since low Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) cannabis, commonly referred to as hemp, became federally legal in 2018. He said with this new state initiative, Utah can stay ahead of the curve for medical cannabis research.
"I'm proud of the state for seeing this. 22 miles to the north in Idaho, everything's banned and here we are in Utah looking at new approaches to big problems. It's great," Bugbee said.
Medical cannabis is currently legal in 38 states and DC. It is expected to become federally legal within about a decade, when Bugbee said big money can go into the research.
"We could be the recipient of significant federal funding here in Utah, because we laid the groundwork to get going. We're not starting from ground zero.
Another goal of the initiative is to bring down the cost of high quality medical cannabis, which is expensive compared to unregulated products on the black market. According to Bugbee, one way to lower the cost is to maximize the efficiency of legal production and cannabis is a crop that holds a lot of potential to do just that.
"We've been studying alfalfa for more than 100 years in detail but we make very incremental progress. There's no big breakthroughs in in alfalfa. But cannabis, we discover new things all the time that really change our thinking about how to optimize the growth of this new crop," Bugbee said.
