Things are moving fast in the international pharmaceutical industry’s push to turn the chemicals behind the remarkable properties of the cannabis plant into trademarked products.

Fears about corporate cannabis have been mounting among small growers and their activist allies since the big push for legalization began nearly a decade ago now.

This May alone, several patents and intellectual property agreements were sought or secured for CBD’s applications.

First, Peak Health of San Francisco announced it had filed a patent application for testing the “bioactivity” of the CBD molecule. According to the company’s press release, “bioactivity” is the complex interplay between a drug and its corresponding receptor in the human body, enabling its ability to produce a biological response. This testing method could be key in the development of effective drug products from CBD.

Next up was Kalytera Therapeutics of Marin County, which was issued a U.S. patent for the use of CBD for the prevention and treatment of “graft versus host disease” (GVHD), a complication that can follow transplants of tissue from a donor to a patient.

Callitas Therapeutics of Vancouver, meanwhile, announced an “intellectual property agreement” for development of CannaMint Strips, a method for oral delivery of cannabinoids.

GW Pharmaceuticals, a UK-based multinational with globe-spanning ambitions, also has a portfolio of intellectual property related to the use of cannabinoids in the treatment of cancer, with several patents and pending applications in both the United States and Europe.

With the list of patents on cannabis applications growing fast, this issue demands attention from the cannabis community.

See the original article at Cannabis Now