The LSU Health Sciences Center has received a $4 million, five-year grant from the National Institute of Drug Abuse to study the effects of cannabinoids on HIV/AIDS patients.Dr. Patricia Molina, head of the physiology department at LSU’s School of Medicine in New Orleans, said she and her team have been working on the project under a basic grant for four years. “We had a basic grant to get us started and used the results from that initial grant to write this new grant that just got funded,” Molina said.The goals of the basic grant were to “characterize the chronic effects of cannabinoids on a variety of parameters such as body weight, viral load, immunological markers and neurophysiological functioning.”The team consists of experts in microbiology, genetics, physiology pharmacology at LSU New Orleans and Tulane. “We basically have a multidisciplinary team involved in the study,” Molina said.The idea for the study came about during the drive for legalized marijuana four years ago. Molina said there was little evidence at the time of the effect the drug had on patients. “There was really no strong evidence of whether this was actually going to have a negative effect, a positive effect or even have no change in AIDS progression,” Molina said. “You can take a drug that’s going to make you hold on to your body weight or make you a little bit hungrier so you can eat better, but if the drug is going to increase the amount of the virus in the blood, you really wouldn’t want to prescribe it or take it.”
Fourteen states have now legalized medical marijuana to treat HIV/AIDS and cancer patients. Louisiana has not, but Molina said that doesn’t have an effect on the research.The most interesting thing Molina and her team found during their research was that the use of cannabinoids had almost no negative effects.”Chronic cannabinoid administration does not appear to have a bad effect,” Molina said. “It appears to have an anti-inflammatory effect.”The behavioral side effects appear to be the only negative so far.”Obviously, psychoactive drugs, and THC is one of them, does affect the ability of learning and functioning,” Molina said. “But other than that, we have not encountered any other negative effects.”The team uses a combination of in-vitro and in-vivo approaches in its research and looks to examine how cannibias produces changes in gene activity that may affect HIV reponse in a patient.”Part of what we’re going to be doing is looking at tissues, gene arrays and modifications of DNA to be able to see where the changes are happening with the chronic cannabinoid administration,” Molina said.Humans haven’t been used in research yet, but Molina said they would “love to do it in the future.”
“We’re not at the clinical level yet,” Molina said. “Every research project has to start step by step. Eventually we definitely want to do some clinical trials.”Molina said more funding would be needed to do clinical trials. The team also needs to get a better understanding at the research level before it moves to the clinical level.”Obviously we would have to learn more about the effects of cannabinoids,” Molina said.The HIV/AIDS virus has been known for constantly mutating, which makes it hard to come up with effective drugs to combat it. Molina said she would like to study how the virus mutates in the presense of cannabinoids, which the team expects to set up a study for in the future.”The virus is constantly changing,” Molina said. “The first thing that we are trying to do is to see whether the presence of THC affects how well the virus integrates into the cell. The virus has to come into the cell and trick it so it can be part of the DNA and part of the replication that goes on inside the cell.”Molina said she would like to one day see a drug with no side effects whatsoever, or “a drug that would decrease viral replication and decrease the progression of HIV/AIDS in an individual without that individual having behavioral side effects.””We want to be able to identify whether one can have beneficial effects without having the behavioral impact,” Molina said. “That would be our ultimate goal.” 
–Contact Katherine Terrell at [email protected]