Empowered Patient Podcast Next-Generation Full-Spectrum Botanical Medicines with Joel Stanley Ajna Biosciences
Joel Stanley is the CEO of Ajna Biosciences, a company developing the next generation of botanical medicines. These full-spectrum drugs, derived from plants and fungi, are regulated and approved through the FDA, unlike dietary supplements. Lead drug candidates are targeting autism, generalized anxiety disorder, and PTSD. With expertise in cultivating and scaling the production of botanical raw materials, Ajna is creating a sustainable model compared to wild-harvested botanicals.
Joel explains, "It's no secret that before about a hundred years ago, all of our medicines were botanical medicines, or mostly coming from plants, or maybe mushrooms. And in the last century, as we developed Western medicine - modern medicine - the drug approval process started to learn how to synthesize molecules and isolate molecules from nature. So we started to step completely away from plant medicine and into a synthetic pharmaceutical landscape. The FDA fairly recently started allowing botanical drugs. So what that means is that it's full-spectrum medicines coming from the given root, shrub, leaf, flower, or mushroom. Those would be botanical drugs. So botanical drugs are not single-compound botanically derived drugs, which make up about 20% of our pharmaceuticals. They're a full-spectrum plant extract, a botanical drug from a regulatory standpoint."
"So, plant-based therapeutics can mean dietary supplements that do not go through clinical trials. They're not legally prescribed by doctors and generally not covered by insurance. Whereas botanical drugs go through the FDA drug approval process, rigorous clinical trials against placebo control to become FDA approved, covered by insurance, and legally prescribable. So that's really what sets what we're doing, creating botanical drugs, apart from what people have considered plant medicine this last century."
"Our most advanced drug in our pipeline is called AJA001, and it's very special to me because I've been basically working on this drug for more than 15 years. It's made in partnership with my previous company. I was the first CEO of a company called Charlotte's Web, which was really the first, and it's still the largest CBD brand out there. It was everything we learned at Charlotte's Web that kind of prompted me to start Ajna BioSciences four years ago. And that first drug is made from full-spectrum hemp, so it is CBD dominant, and it does have other cannabinoids, such as THC, as well as other minor cannabinoids. It also has certain terpenes."
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