MÍDIA

This week, in an unprecedented decision, the 6th Panel of the Superior Court of Justice allowed three Brazilians to plant marijuana for medicinal purposes.

To show the impact of this decision on the lives of those who depend on very expensive treatments – and who can now be authorized to produce their own medicine at home – check out the conversation with researchers and with one of the patients who received this authorization.

A little marijuana plant will get big, flower, and be transformed into this extract. This is how the entire production is controlled by a 27-year-old who lives in Sorocaba, in the interior of São Paulo.

“I chose not to appear because there is still a lot of prejudice. I’m not doing anything wrong,” said the patient, who asked not to be identified.

And he’s not committing any crime, anyway. The Superior Court of Justice authorizes it. Until now, habeas corpus – authorizations for planting – had only been issued by lower courts, never by the STJ, which is a federal court. But the ministers of the 6th Panel were unanimous in their decision last Tuesday (14th).

The young man from Sorocaba had already asked for authorization to plant in the municipal and state courts, but without success. In addition to this case, the ministers of the 6th Panel of the STJ also gave permission for a woman and her nephew to grow marijuana for medicinal purposes. He treats psychiatric disorders.

“I have been taking medicine since I was 12 years old. Anything was cause for anxiety. I had really, really bad depression,” he said, who was introduced to medical marijuana by his mother.

The mother, in turn, decided to take a course.

“I had a certain prejudice, but then you learn in the course that what you are taking is a medication”, she says.

Reporter: And how are you today?
Patient: I haven’t known what it’s like to have an anxiety attack for almost two years.

Who prescribed marijuana substances for the three patients was Dr. Eliane Nunes, psychiatrist and founder of the Brazilian Society for the Study of Cannabis Sativa. She and a group of lawyers helped to set up court cases for patients authorized by the STJ to plant at home.

“We want the right of all patients to plant. What we don’t have here in Brazil is the regulation of this domestic cultivation”, says Eliane.

Today, there are five associations with granted habeas corpus for planting and production in Brazil. And there is no exact number of families authorized to cultivate for medicinal use.

It is also possible to import or buy medicines made with substances taken from the plant in pharmacies. But there are many people who want to grow and make their own oil because of the high price.

The planting of cannabis Sativa appears in 33 proposals that are being processed today in the Chamber of Deputies. In the Senate, there are three projects that deal with the regulation of the cultivation, harvesting, and medicinal use.

Source: G1

“I heard my son say ‘I love you’ for the first time when I was 8 years old”, says Priscila Guterres Moraes, 41, Levi’s mother. Premature, autistic, and unable to express himself alone, the mother says the boy found new “brain connections” that unlocked his speech after receiving the substances derived from marijuana.

The achievement of incalculable value for parents is a reflection of the struggle for the release of medical cannabis intensified since 2010 in Brazil: the import authorization for the product that guarantees a new life for Priscila’s son was one of more than 70,000 already granted since 2015.

A number even lower than the potential of medicines, according to experts, but which already represents a 15-fold increase in imports in 5 years. An expanding market that promises to treat more than 20 different medical conditions and which already has 18 products authorized for sale in pharmacies across the country.

Levi, Priscilla’s son, is now almost 10 years old. After so many consultations, the mother herself explains in a simplified way what CBD (cannabidiol), one of the substances in cannabis, caused her son: “[He had a brain condition] as if they were disconnected wires… It seems that [with CBD] the connections met, the little threads met”, says Priscila.

This system is directly or indirectly related to a list of conditions, disorders, or diseases described in different studies with cannabis derivatives. They are in the spotlight of science and even the international pharmaceutical market: refractory epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, ASD, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and even mental illnesses such as depression and anxiety.

Source: G1

The National Health Surveillance Agency (ANVISA) approved the use and marketing in Brazil of the first product derived from medical cannabis with a THC concentration above 0.2%. This is Cannabis sativaGreenCare Extract (160.32 mg/ml). This is the 16th cannabis-based product approved by ANVISA.

Medicine is the 15th allowed in Brazil. The medicine will be manufactured in Canada and can be sold, with a prescription, in pharmacies and drugstores.

The National Health Surveillance Agency (Anvisa) approved, this Monday (25), the importation of a new medicinal product based on Cannabis, the Cannabidiol Active Pharmaceutical. The drug can be sold in pharmacies and drugstores, with a doctor’s prescription, through a type B prescription, which has a blue color.

This is the 15th cannabidiol-based product approved for medicinal purposes in Brazil. The product, which will be manufactured in Canada, is an oral solution with a concentration of 20 mg/mL of cannabidiol (CBD), with up to 0.2% of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC).

The measure was published in the Official Gazette (DOU). The delivery of the product must be made by the pharmacist.

Source: G1

Cannabis-based treatments have shown great promise for a number of conditions, such as chronic pain, epilepsy, and multiple sclerosis. As a result, the number of drugs approved by Anvisa that use cannabis as a base, as well as imports, has also been growing.

In all, there are already 14 cannabis-based drugs approved by Anvisa, which can be found in pharmacies here in Brazil. Imports have also risen sharply, from 19,150 in 2020 to 40,191 in 2021, an increase of 109.8% in just one year.

Prescription is still very rare

However, cannabis-based medicines can only be sold with a doctor’s prescription, and this is where the issue starts to get a little more complex. Even with the rise in drug approvals, the number of prescriptions is still relatively low.

According to data from Anvisa, only 2,100 Brazilian professionals are able to prescribe cannabis-based medicines. This number is equivalent to only 0.5% of the total number of doctors currently working in Brazil.

“The medical profession needs to delve deeper into the potential of medical cannabis, because, without knowledge, there is no safety to prescribe”, declared neurosurgeon Flávia Montagner. According to the doctor, the demand for cannabis-based medicines by patients has grown a lot.

Source: Olhar Digital

From depression to epilepsy, multiple sclerosis to chronic pain, phobia to menstrual cramps — never has science advanced so far in discovering the medicinal properties of cannabis, the marijuana plant. It is estimated that the effects of cannabidiol, a substance found in small volumes in the stem and leaf of the herb, are being tested in at least twenty diseases in large reference centers around the world. One of the most extraordinary works is Brazilian. Researchers from the University of São Paulo (USP), in Ribeirão Preto, identified the therapeutic action of the compound in burnout, the syndrome of professional burnout.

Published in the journal JAMA, of the American Medical Association, the study evaluated 120 health professionals on the front lines of the response to Covid-19. Daily doses of 300 mg of the drug reduced symptoms of emotional fatigue by 25% in the volunteers, depression by 50%, and anxiety by 60%.

Well, now the group of scientists is studying the action of cannabidiol on Covid-19.

— We are evaluating, in partnership with the USP Institute of Psychiatry in São Paulo, the effect of cannabidiol in preventing the neurological and general medical consequences of coronavirus infection — says the leader of the research, psychiatrist José Alexandre Crippa.

Scientists have discovered that cannabidiol acids can bind to the Spike protein, the structure that the coronavirus uses to enter cells. With this, cannabis compounds could prevent infection. The work, published in the Journal of Natural Products, was developed in a laboratory and still needs to go through new steps, such as testing on humans.

Source: O Globo

Scientists from the Federal University of Paraíba (UFPB) created an adhesive capable of curing, in 24 hours, the lesion caused by the herpes simplex virus. The very low-cost dressing, moldable to the size of the lesion, and which requires constant replacement, works through the controlled release of the drug Acyclovir in the region of the skin or mucosa affected by this category of the infectious agent.

How is it developed

Developed from a mixture of bioabsorbable and biodegradable synthetic polymers, the regenerative adhesive has a small dimension and high surface area, facilitating the addition of pharmacological agents, mainly Acyclovir, and aesthetic comfort.

Both the size and shape and the concentration of drug available are easily adaptable to the needs of a patient, unlike the current treatment through the use of Acyclovir tablets or ointment.

Kaline Ferreira, one of the inventors of the patent, explains that the characteristics of the adhesive can be modified as the proportion of polymers that make up its structure is varied. It is also possible to change the release of Acyclovir by modifying the structural dimensions of the dressing by controlling the polymer concentrations used and the production process parameters.

She points out that, even though it can be sold in any pharmacy, the Ministry of Health reinforces that any antiviral drug needs a prescription.

How the herpes sore patch can be made available

The regenerative adhesive was developed between 2015 and 2017. The patent was filed in June 2018, with the Brazilian Patent Office (BPTO). The dressing development process will be published soon. The articles are undergoing peer review in international journals.

The creators of the patent intend to talk to pharmaceutical companies to evaluate the cost-benefit for large-scale production of the adhesive.

Source: Portal Correio

Cyptocurrency innovation has made virtually everything in the digital world susceptible to tokenization, and intellectual property is no exception to the trend thanks to non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

NFTs – intangible assets that give their holder a unique certificate of authenticity – are gaining ground in the patent market through the optimization of several critical operations.

The music, art and even video game industries have all witnessed the potential of NFTs to safeguard value; now, intellectual property is being protected in this way also in the field of corporate patents.

The tokenization of these patents is carried out through the blockchain, which allows the parties to guarantee the traceability of the operation, as well as its centralization in one place.

“The current process requires lawyers, contracts, and a lot of bureaucracy, now, using NFTs, the entire model is simplified and all the information is in one place: the blockchain,” she told Bloomberg Línea Lavinia Meliti, who directs the strategy. and execution of IPwe’s business initiatives, a global platform for patent transactions.

Meliti indicates that NFTs offer a great opportunity if we take into account that “worldwide patent transactions, which are mostly licenses and acquisitions, are US$ 180 billion per year, which is a small percentage”.

“What if it gets to 10% or more? (This is) good for innovators, owners, partners, for finance, for service providers, and for society,” she said.

Lavinia Meliti indicated that she likes to refer to NFTs “as digital repositories that store all the information relevant to a patent in a single secure set – and this is happening for the first time in the history of patents.”

Instead of “having to go to multiple places where information about a patent can be stored, everything will exist in one place and the holder will control what can and cannot be seen and by whom”.

She says that “the concept of patents has existed for thousands of years, and the legal frameworks that support them have been in existence since the 15th century. Today, there are around 20 million patents worldwide that are granted by approximately 200 independent national patent offices that exist in each country that grants the patents.”

Incidentally, IPwe has partnered with tech giant IBM to tokenize patents in different areas such as electric vehicles or (soon) the metaverse – the so-called next internet age.

The company facilitates these transactions in Smart Pools, which are a type of patent bank in which patent holders offer their NFT-based licenses to consortium members – many are SMEs – to drive innovation at all scales.

Lavinia Meliti told Bloomberg Línea that she will launch a Smart Pool focused on blockchain patents, “allowing their holders, large companies, to share them with other companies”.

“We will have several of the largest blockchain patent holders in the world, located in Asia, Europe and North America,” said the executive, who did not reveal the names of the large corporations, but informed the interest of several participants in Latin America, as these see potential in markets such as Colombia and Mexico.

As for the participants, she commented that the profiles are divided between the holders of these patents and the members, who pay a kind of subscription to be able to use these technologies.

Small and medium-sized companies with revenues of less than US$1 million per year will have free access to all available patent portfolios.

Patent holders contribute their patents to Smart Pools, where they are then tokenized through NFTs. “If the patent holder decides to license it, license tokens linked to the original NFT will be created,” explains Meliti.

Thus, the tokenized patent license is transferred to the licensee for as long as it is in effect. And thanks to smart contracts, licensees get reminders when those licenses are about to expire.

“The smart contract is integrated into the NFT with standardized terms associated with each patent. The patent holder sets out the terms of their contract, what is public and what is not,” she adds.

According to the expert, “the capital, the parties to the transaction have the transparency, standardization of information and the ease of interaction they need”.

Source: Bloomberg Linea

BPTO was considered the sixth most innovative IP institute in the world in 2021, according to an annual ranking released by the World Trademark Review (WTR), which analyzed 60 national or regional IP institutions.

The ranking was led by the IP institutes of the European Union and South Korea. The third position was Singapore, followed by the United Kingdom and Mexico. In sixth place, alongside the BPTO, were the IP institutions of Australia and Chile.

In relation to Brazil, the publication highlighted that the BPTO had significant growth in the ranking in recent years, leaving 41st place in 2018 and rising about 20 positions in 2021. WTR highlighted the Institute’s actions to reduce the backlog, modernize its systems electronics, as well as stimulate innovation and economic development through IP assets.

Source: BPTO

Use of fingerprints on smartphone screens has been used for a long time. The technology serves well and has stagnated in recent years. However, Xiaomi intends to change that and has now filed a patent application for a fingerprint sensor that can be used across the entire screen of the device.

Xiaomi patents fingerprint recognition technology anywhere on the screen

According to the latest data from the Chinese Patent Office, the company has obtained a patent for fingerprint scanning technology. The technology allows you to use the scanner more freely without having to place your finger on a certain point on the screen.

In the patent, Xiaomi described the operation of a network of integrated infrared LED elements located between an AMOLED display and a capacitive touch layer. The network of “receivers” will be under the display. These elements will form the basic building blocks of the new scanner, which will serve the entire screen of the device.

Xiaomi’s patented fingerprint sensor

When the user touches the screen with their finger, the touch layer records the touch, its location, and the shape of the fingerprint, after which the LED elements begin to emit infrared light in the desired area. In this case, elements elsewhere on the screen will remain inactive.

Infrared light is then reflected off the fingertip and projected onto the receivers. The system will process the data to obtain a “card” of the fingerprint and the smartphone will compare it with the sample saved in memory. Once the fingerprint is identified, the user can unlock the device by touching any part of the screen.

Xiaomi’s patent is a major advance in fingerprint recognition and a smartphone, which currently has small screen spaces for this recognition. In addition, users increasingly seek convenience, and this patent brings that too.

In August, Huawei patented its technology for a similar purpose in several markets, including China, Europe, USA, Japan, Korea, and India, but the development did not find commercial use, which, according to the site, must have been due to US sanctions that seriously restrict the company’s technological capacity. As Xiaomi has not yet faced such sanctions, new scanners may be launched shortly.

Source: SempreUpdate