Jamaican scientist Dr Henry Lowe says he and a team of fellow researchers have found that a flavonoid they had isolated from the cannabis plant five years ago has the potential to mitigate against COVID-19, and the development has attracted the attention and support of the United States National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Yesterday Dr Lowe, who was named Jamaica Observer Business Leader in 2006, explained that he and his colleague scientists had, in 2015, actually isolated the flavonoid, named Caflanone from a very rare cannabis plant strain discovered in Jamaica.

But because there was no longer any emergency for us to continue dedicating time to the research into those viruses, we decided to switch back into full gear on pancreatic cancer,” said Dr Lowe, who last year received an exclusive patent from the US Government's Patent Office for the use of Caflanone to treat pancreatic cancer.

However, after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a public health emergency of international concern in January this year, Dr Lowe and his colleagues — Drs Wilfred Ngwa, Rajiv Kumar, Daryl Thompson , William Lyerly, Roscoe Moore, Terry-Elinor Reid, and Ngeh Toyang — decided to collaborate to broaden the base of research on other flavonoids, among them Equivir, Hesperetin, Myricetin, and Linebacker.

“Our team is very excited to have a drug with unique potential to combat this dreadful COVID-19 disease,” he said in a written note delivered by Dr Lowe.