Medical cannabis has been all the rage in the UK of late.

Headlines about two young epilepsy sufferers, Billy Caldwell and Alfie Dingely, who were denied access to cannabis oil that helped keep their conditions under control, sparked a debate that led to the home secretary Sajid Javid's decision to allow medical cannabis to be available on prescription in the UK.

Whilst the wonders of cannabis have been touted for conditions such as cancer and arthritis, relatively little is known about the green leaf and its supposedly magical properties.

That’s where Oxford Cannabinoid Technologies (OCT) comes in. The bio-tech start-up, founded by Kingsley Capital Partners, has been launched in partnership with the University of Oxford to research the potential benefits of the plant.

OCT’s chairman, and managing partner at Kingsley, Neil Mahapatra, became interested in the medical cannabis market after seeing the growth in the UK following its legalisation there.

However, it wasn’t until he lost his mother to lung cancer, that he began to really research the impact cannabis could have on diseases.

“Whilst there is something to suggest cannabis can help with cancer, nowhere near enough research is being done,” he tells the Standard. “Yet, in the regions where cannabis is legal, it is under the guise of having medical benefits.”

Mahapatra, who studied his undergraduate degree in Biology at the University of Oxford, decided to turn to his old biology professor to discuss it. “I said: ‘The medical cannabis market is opening up, no one understands how it works, why don’t we design a research programme with Oxford?”

With that, OCT was born.

How can cannabis be a medical product?

If you take apart the cannabis plant, it is full of different molecules, known as cannabinoid molecules. The THC molecule is the psychoactive molecule that gives you the head high, whilst much has been written about CBD, the molecule that forms CBD oil which Billy Caldwel and Alfie Dingley use to treat their epilepsy.

“Beyond CBD, there are loads of minor cannabinoids that have not been looked at yet. They could have huge medical potential,” explains Mahapatra.

It sounds radical to turn to a plant for medicine but Mahapatra explains that this is how the pharmaceutical industry has worked in the past. In the 1970s and 1980s, companies were mining natural products such as plants, bacteria, and fungi in order to generate medicine. Yet, cannabis was ignored because of its social stigma, he says.

OCT is hoping to change this. It will start with research on the other cannabinoids, focusing on four major areas: pain, cancer, inflammation and neurological disease. Depending on where this research goes, the company could look to develop its own drugs or collaborate with pharmaceutical firms to take products to market.

It will be funding researchers at Oxford, as well as other universities throughout the UK. Further international partnerships will be announced later this year.

Yet due to the stigma around cannabis, it hasn’t been easy to get OCT off the ground. “When we started looking at the market, a lot of people in London questioned what we were doing,” says Mahapatra. “We took a fair bit of reputational risk on it.”

Collaborating with Oxford certainly helped in legitimising the venture. As well, OCT has recruited a former pharmaceutical executive Dr John Lucas as its CCO and former head of strategic development for Barts and the London School of Medicine, Dr Jutta Roth, as its CSO to demonstrate that it is serious.

“In order for this market to become legitimised and accepted, the actors have to be utterly professional,” he explains.

The legal challenge

With Oxford involved and a team on board, the next stage in OCT’s development was receiving sign off from the Home Office.

The start-up needed a license to be able to research cannabis, a long and expensive process. Even the security of the transportation of the plants needed to be signed off and checked before the license could be issued.

Mahapatra commends the Home Office for taking this approach. “It was long but it was right to be so long,” he says. “The wrong people trying to get into this market and get a license might be dis-incentivised by that process and that’s a good thing.”

He also thinks the department’s approach to allowing cannabis prescriptions is a positive one too. Though this won’t necessarily impact OCT’s research, it will help businesses that are bringing medical cannabis products to market, something Kingsley Partners is hoping to do in the future.

If this announcement leads to more companies embarking on medical cannabis research, Mahapatra says he welcomes the competition.

“The more people looking into the medical benefits of cannabis, the better it will be for all of us. This plant has the potential to save so many lives.”

Following a Series A fundraising of $10 million, OCT also announced that a famous face would be joining its board as a patron, Sir Patrick Stewart, who is very supportive of the company’s mission. As well, Baroness Meacher, chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group for Drug Policy Reform is part of the Advisory Board.

“They are very supportive of the initiative,” says Mahapatra. “We will announce more members of the advisory board in the future but it’s an exciting time, we have the right team and the right skillsets around the table.”

And whilst OCT is very positive about the potential cannabis has, there is always the fear that the research could throw a spanner into the works.

“If we discover cannabis can cause cancer and we find that, we will have to report it to the medical authorities,” he says. “But right now, the evolution of the market, without any knowledge to the evolution of the molecular actions of cannabinoids, is something that is happening.

“We will have to see. The next 18-24 months are very exciting.”