Johnson & Johnson Urges FDA To Take Interim Steps As It Continues To Review CBD

The FDA's Science Board has once again reviewed the idea of incorporating cannabinoids into dietary supplements.

At a Tuesday meeting with the FDA's public advisory committee, the panel focused on “challenges in evaluating the safety of dietary supplement and food ingredients with predicted pharmacological activity, utilizing cannabinoids as a case study.”

Drugmaker Johnson & Johnson JNJ was one of many businesses that urged health regulators to come up with rules on incorporating CBD in food and dietary supplements, reported Cannabis Wire.

One of the executives at the company’s pharmaceutical arm, Cynthia Afshari, said the regulatory body could “start to chip away” at the issue of CBD, which continues to remain unresolved.

“There are some really high-quality tools that the agency has at their disposal that could start to chip away at least at putting that high-quality kind of mechanistic information out there that they could be picked up by others,” said Afshari, vice president and global head of preclinical sciences and translational safety at the Janssen Pharmaceutical Cos.

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FDA’s Health Concerns Over CBD

During the hearing, regulators acknowledged that both CBD and other cannabis extracts are available even though the FDA continues to issue warnings regarding their safety.

Patrick Cournoyer, a regulatory scientist with the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, pointed out that CBD can lead to liver damage and also interact with prescribed medications.

Recently the FDA took “targeted actions” against several CBD vendors for selling unauthorized products for use in food-producing animals.

“The market is large and our resources are not unlimited, but we’ve prioritized products with the greatest public health risk and we’ve issued warning letters to select firms,” Cournoyer said.

Meanwhile, FDA Commissioner Dr. Robert M. Califf said the agency had made little progress on the regulatory framework around CBD products since  Trump signed the Farm Bill in late 2018.

“We just know more because we’ve done more research,” Califf said at a congressional panel, further noting “the amazing plethora derivatives of the cannabis plant [are] surely quite profound and astounding and already in widespread use for a variety of means.”

Benzinga photo. Source: Image from Shutterstock