Drug Science’s Project Twenty21, Europe’s largest medical cannabis patient registry, has gone live, registering its first patient for a medical cannabis prescription.
The Project Twenty21 registry aims to assess the efficacy of medical cannabis by monitoring the health outcomes of 20,000 patients who will be prescribed the medicine. The registry will make up Europe’s largest body of evidence on the safety of these medicines, and Drug Science hopes the findings will help integrate cannabis into UK healthcare.
Set up in November 2019, the project came into full swing on 4th August, registering patients who suffer from conditions such as chronic pain, PTSD, anxiety, Multiple Sclerosis, Tourette’s, and Substance Use Disorder.
Professor David Nutt, drug specialist for the project, said: “Twenty21 is a remarkable initiative in health care – I am so pleased to be engaged with something so radical and innovative.”
Currently in the UK patients can only be prescribed cannabis by a doctor who has been trained to do so, and the product is only licensed for a limited number of conditions. A recent Care Quality Commission report also found that only 18 cannabis prescriptions have been given through the NHS, despite medical cannabis being made available to patients from 2018.
The project will be working alongside a network of private clinics and licensed producers, including Khiron Life Sciences, Bod Australia Ltd, Cellen Therapeutics, Senzer Pharmaceuticals, and Jamaican Medical Cannabis Corporation, to provide high quality cannabis-based medicinal products (CBMPs), which will be subsidised at £150 per product per month.
The medicines covered include dried flower with varying amounts of THC and CBD, CBD oils, and synthetic preparations.
Patients applying for the registry must have one of the listed conditions and must have tried two different medications that have been unsuccessful.
Director of Project Twenty21, Amelia Middlemiss, said: “Project Twenty21 is a unique project, it has truly embraced collaborative working between academia, clinicians, industry, and patient groups. Each stakeholder is pulling out all the stops to achieve true innovation in medicine, that focuses on patient’s needs. We are proud as a group to be able to go live with Project Twenty21.”
