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Sana Life Science and its mission to unlock the medical cannabis industry

We’ve got used to a lot over the last year.

We’ve got used to Zoom. We’ve got used to trudging round the park. We’ve got used to remembering to stuff a mask in our pocket before we head out the door.

We’ve also got used to something altogether more complicated: Data.

In to time at all, we mastered the significance of the R number, got into the habit of checking case rates in our local area, became accustomed to deciphering graphs cooly denoting the day’s human toll.

The pandemic has been a crash course in how data informs public health policy and the way we live our lives.

For the first time, we’ve been consuming the same data doctors do, simultaneously and with the same interest, giving us a glimpse inside the decision loop and revealing how reliant health policy makers are on numbers on a page.

If the medical cannabis industry wants to put itself firmly on the agenda of clinicians, it must learn this pretty simple less: Data matters.

That’s the core principle at the heart of Sana Life Science, a company on a mission to transform the fortunes of medical cannabis in the UK by supporting developers to produce the data it believes will break down barriers and increase the number of prescriptions for cannabis-based pharmaceutical in the UK.

Co-founder Ben Hamburger told Cannabis Wealth: “Sometimes people in this industry think quite short term.

“It’s difficult to achieve measurable success in a healthcare market, which is fundamentally a pretty slow-moving thing.

“What we’re trying is do is think three years ahead and what we can achieve over that time horizon particularly around clinical data.

Many cannabis-based medicines are in production but only two are prescribed in the UK

“In our opinion, that’s the key that unlocks prescribers and clinicians in the UK and makes them feel comfortable.”

He set up the company with Arjun Rajyagor – who won the BBC TV show ‘Junior Apprentice’ in 2010 – two years ago.

The pair were disillusioned with their corporate work at firms like Goldman Sachs and KPMG and yearned for something more fulfilling – or, as Rajyagor puts it, ‘we hated it, being up being up until three in the morning helping multimillionaires and trillion-pound companies make more money’.

After spending most of a year thinking about where they wanted to redeploy their efforts they settled on the cannabis industry.

Rajyagor said he was partly inspired by his belief cannabis-based medicine could improve his parents’ health problems, adding: “It helps people, it’s a business opportunity and we can make an impact.

“We can bring however many years of corporate experience into a new and emerging market and help drive it to where it will eventually end up.”

Eventually, Sana Life Sciences will import and distribute cannabis-based treatments but the company is engaged at an earlier phase of the process for the time being.

The company is teaming up with pharmaceutical operations in the development phase to help structure clinical trials which will produce data that is convincing enough to assuage the concerns of cautious clinicians but streamlined enough to get the market moving.

Hamburger says there is a split in the industry’s research output between ‘very long-term’ data collection, referencing the work of GW Pharmaceuticals, or ‘nothing to a click above nothing, which is surface level observational data’.

Instead, they want to encourage companies to carry out phase two level trials and produce rigorous efficacy data, arguing decade-long phase four trials are not always necessary for a ‘plant with thousands of years and use’ and not always in patients’ interests.

And the pandemic, Hamburger said, has shown that data can be properly collected and treatments rolled out quickly and safely when there is the will to do so.

Rajyagor added: “[Rolling out vaccines] after six months of development and testing which would usually take 10 years in any other pharmaceutical context proves that the world is moving forward and there are opportunities to do this without wasting a decade to get there.”

Hamburger’s theory is that if the industry is serious about growing it must engage with the regulatory system and make a concerted effort to appeal to the people holding the prescription pads.

He said: “We think British doctors are fundamentally sensible and once they are provided with sensible data, they will start prescribing it on a more regular basis.”

Despite a 2018 law change, prescriptions are rare and can not be issued by a GP

And the same rationale applies to patients – a growing industry requires public confidence and demand.

Rajyagor said: “I think people are going to be more open to listening to medical data and taking it in [post-pandemic] as long as its done in a way that is understandable because fundamentally that’s been the barrier with medicines, that clinical data has always been too complicated.

“Patients like talking to each other and hearing from each other so if you know someone who is feeding data back into a network and you as another potential patient can see that aggregated data across patients currently taking a medication, its obviously going to help you make a decision about whether or not this works.”

They are also dipping their toe in the lifestyle sector, backing CBD products they say have the research behind them to boost consumer confidence in an industry that has sometimes attracted businesspeople less interested in science and more interested in quick returns – ‘cowboys’, Rajyagor puts it less diplomatically.

They are working with CBD ranges like Four Five and Darren Clarke, with more product partnerships planned this year.

The progress of medical-cannabis in the UK has been glacial.

Despite the law being changed in 2018, prescriptions for one of two cannabis-derived treatments licensed in the UK can only be signed off by specialist hospital doctors for a handful of conditions.

While the pair believe there will be big commercial opportunities down the line, they say the industry isn’t a good place to make a quick buck and they’re resigned to that.

Rajyagor said: “We’re honest with companies and say ‘with the phase two data you’re collecting, we’re not necessarily going to unlock tens of thousands of prescriptions on day one’.

“It’s a journey, we need to engage with clinicians and get them to start prescribing and make them comfortable and slowly it will grow.”

Hamburger added: “Maybe we’re wrong and in two years time there’ll be a wave of recreational legalisation across the world and doctors will start proscribing products without data and it will take off – but on the balance of probabilities, we think doctors are going to wait to see data until that happens.”

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