Hinanti Koltai’s March 27 lecture is open to community
By Ross Balding
With the medical use of marijuana becoming more common and public awareness of it increasing, more and more scientists are judiciously studying all potential medical uses of the plant. Hinanti Koltai is one such expert, and will be presenting a lecture about her research on next month on the URI Kingston campus.
The senior research scientist for the Agricultural Research Organization at the Volcani Center in Rishon Lezion, Israel, Koltai’s will lecture on “Medical cannabis: From Weed to Molecules and Drug Development,” March 27 at noon in the Center for Biological and Life Sciences, 120 Flagg Road, Kingston. The lecture, hosted by the URI College of Pharmacy, will detail her research, which has focused on using plant-derived substances as anti-cancer and anti-inflammatory drugs, as well as plant hormones and genomics. Medical cannabis research has become one of her leading research topics, and she studies the medicinal properties of cannabis as well as the development of new cannabis-derived drugs.
“I look forward to interacting with URI scientists and in particular with scientists, lecturers and students of the pharmacy college, to discuss this exciting and rising issue of medical cannabis,” Koltai said. “URI is well known for breakthrough research, good science and a collaborative approach.”
Israel has a long history with medical cannabis and is considered a global leader of its research and innovation. The medical use of cannabis sativa has been legal in the country since the early 1990s, before California became the first state to legalize medical use. Before that, however, Israeli scientists became the first to isolate the compound of THC and recognize it as the main psychoactive ingredient in 1964. The same scientists also discovered CBD, the compound believed to give cannabis it’s anti-inflammatory properties. The Israeli military has even been known to use cannabis to treat its soldiers for post-traumatic stress disorder.
Koltai’s lab has primarily been interested in deciphering what it called the “entourage effect.” This phrase has been used to describe the process in which the many different compounds found in cannabis work together to provide its medicinal effects. Besides THC and CBD, there are hundreds of other compounds, including other cannabinoids as well as compounds called flavonoids and terpenes.
“The entourage effect is the synergy between cannabis-derived compounds,” Koltai said. “Synergistic interactions may occur between different cannabinoids, or between cannabinoids and terpenes. Hence, cannabis medical preparations should be optimized to contain mixtures of these sativa-derived compounds and/or the whole extract with compositions showing the greatest synergistic activity.”
Koltai’s lecture is free and open to the campus community.
Ross Balding is a senior journalism major and intern with the URI Academic Health Collaborative.