Systematic Investigation of Rare Cannabinoids with Pain Receptors

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PROJECT SUMMARY Remedies derived from the cannabis plants have been used for management of pain for centuries. Recent understanding of the clinical effects of cannabis and the corresponding cannabinoids in the treatment of pain has been focused on two major phytocannabinoids, delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and cannabidiol (CBD). Though effective, these compounds cause sedation and drowsiness. On the other hand, there are more than 110 known minor phytocannabinoids; however, only a few limited studies related to their analgesic properties exists to date. The major obstacle in studying rare cannabinoids is their limited availability. Numerous purifications of plant extracts mixtures usually provide only milligram quantities of pure compounds from kilograms of plant material, making such endeavors highly nonpractical as well as unsustainable. In fact, most of minor phytocannabinoids are not commercially available or listed in NIDA’s Drug Supply Program (DSP). As synthetic organic chemists and biologists, uniquely situated at the interface of chemistry and biology, our research programs are devoted to providing solutions to the supply problem in the form of sustainable and practical syntheses as well as performing fundamental biological studies. By providing an access to rare phytochemicals by synthetic means, we expect to remove the barrier of supply as a prerequisite for studying their analgesic properties. Specifically, this proposal describes synthetic approaches to several classes of rare phytocannabinoids and systematic evaluation of their anti-inflammatory potential in microglial cells. Minor cannabinoids with strong anti-inflammatory will undergo further evaluation towards their agonism/antagonism of major endogenous pain circuitry systems including cannabinoid receptors (CB1, CB2, GPR55) and vanilloid/transient receptor potential cation channel subfamily V (TRPV), subfamily A (TRPA), subfamily M (TRPM). It is expected that these studies will establish well-defined pharmacological properties of rare phytocannabinoids with respect to the major receptors involved in pain sensation.