Is fish the key to speeding up medical cannabis testing?

Fish are no longer just used to grow cannabis in aquaponics, but can also speed up certain medical studies on cannabis. Cannabis by speeding up the selection process for the varieties used.

Companies using zebrafish would be able to select varieties and organize them according to therapeutic potential much more quickly than with mice or human models.

The zebrafish would have already been used to determine which cannabis varieties can help with sleep problems, convulsions, Parkinson's disease and pain, with additional indications for autism and anxiety under study.

The zebrafish cannabis test model was developed by Israeli company Camanex, the applied cannabis science arm of MIGAL Galilee Research Institute, and Canonic, a subsidiary of IT biotech company Evogene.

These companies also worked together to cultivate the cannabis strains before moving into their laboratories.

Earlier this year, researchers at the University of Bar-Ilan used zebrafish in a study on sleep to monitor chromosomal activity during periods of rest. The researchers report that zebrafish have a brain structure similar to that of humans, though much simpler, and having no skull, brain activity is easier to monitor.

In 2017, a zebrafish model was used by researchers at the University of Mississippi to determine the anti-epileptic properties of cannabis.

Further research published in the magazine Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology & Biological Psychiatry revealed that the zebrafish would be an «excellent model organism» for studying the endocannabinoid system.