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UK: Cannabis spray could get Canada launch
Mike Verdin The Times
Tuesday 11 May 2004 Canadian patients may beat Britons to access to Sativex, the cannabis-based painkiller developed by GW Pharmaceuticals, after the company asked the country's healthcare regulator for approval. Dr Geoffrey Guy, the GW Pharmaceuticals chairman, said it was "technically possible" that Canada could be the first country to approve Sativex despite an application have been placed with UK regulators a year ago. "The Canadian assessment system is shorter," Dr Guy told Times Online. "In Canada assessment takes about nine months. In the UK, 18 months is not unusual." The comments follow a warning by the company that it had been overoptimistic in its timetable for Sativex in the UK. "Whilst the directors of GW have not altered their expectations that approval of Sativex will be granted, it is now clear that the regulatory process will continue past the end of the second quarter," GW said two weeks ago in a statement which sent shares in the pharmaceuticals giant down 25 per cent. The application to Health Canada for approval follows five years of talks with the medicines and healthcare regulator. Canada, a market GW estimates at about two-thirds the size of the UK's, has proved particularly open to the prospect of cannabis-based treatments after a landmark case which confirmed the right to use the drug for medicinal purposes. Subsequent legal action obliged cannabis treatments to be made available on prescription. While Canadian authorities have, in a trial programme, contracted Prairie Plant Systems to grow cannabis in a disused mine in Manitoba, the project has met with mixed success. GW Pharmaceuticals, which grows more than 40,000 marijuana plants a year at a secret location in the English countryside, believes that Canadian approval for Sativex would ease the way for consent in other Commonwealth countries, Dr Guy said. UK endorsement for the painkiller, which is administered by spraying into the mouth, would herald agreement in other European states. GW Pharmaceuticals shares stood 3.5p higher at 135p in afternoon trade.
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