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In this video, David Aronoff, MD, chair of the department of medicine at Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis, discusses a recent testing cannabidiol (CBD) against COVID-19 in the lab and in mice, and how to guide patients seeking treatment for COVID-19.

The following is a transcript of his remarks:

If a patient were to come to me and ask about the use of CBD oil to prevent COVID-19 or reduce the severity of it, I would say that right now, that approach is not ready for prime time. There are other, better ways that we know are safe and very effective to prevent COVID-19 and reduce the severity if someone gets ill. So wear your mask, socially distance, get vaccinated, and if you get symptomatically ill with COVID, let a healthcare professional know, because you may be eligible for things like monoclonal antibodies or new medications like Paxlovid [nirmatrelvir/ritonavir] or repurposed medicines like fluvoxamine [Luvox]. But it's really important to engage with a licensed healthcare professional if you're sick with COVID-19.

These investigators thought that there may be some anti-inflammatory effects of CBD, and that might be useful to suppress some of the inflammation that can occur in patients who have COVID-19. But the investigators found a surprising result, which is that CBD and one of its active metabolites didn't really have too much of an effect on the inflammatory response of the epithelial cells they were studying. But rather, and curiously, the CBD seemed to block the replication of the SARS CoV-2 virus in the respiratory epithelial cells.

This really led the investigators to dig deeper into trying to understand whether the effect they were seeing was specific to CBD or could be found in other compounds that may be also identified in marijuana and to try to drill down on mechanisms through which CBD could be limiting SARS CoV-2 replications in epithelial cells.

And finally, based on what they found in vitro, they wanted to know if there were any correlates of this compound being used in humans that may show some promise for reducing the risk of COVID-19 and even went as far as doing an interventional study in mice to look at the impact of CBD on reducing the severity of SARS COVID-2 infection in a mouse model.

While this study is really interesting and promising, we don't yet have data in humans that show that we can use CBD oil in therapeutic ways to prevent COVID-19 or reduce the severity of COVID-19. And really what we need is an actual randomized placebo-controlled, double-blind study, which is now regularly being done to look at therapeutic and preventive strategies for COVID-19. Right now, the best we can say about CBD oil is that it's a promising idea. But until we have properly controlled studies, we don't actually know how effective or not this is in humans.

Even the human component of the study that was just published, although it was retrospective, which has its limitations, it was looking at essentially medical-grade CBD oil used in the treatment of people who have severe seizure disorders. So we really don't know how commercially-available, easy-to-get CBD preparations might perform in protecting people from COVID-19.

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