"Cannabis in Cancer Care"

The Case Comprehensive Cancer Center will host a seminar series event Friday, May 4, from noon to 1 p.m. in the Iris S. and Bert L. Wolstein Research Building auditorium. The event will feature Donald I. Abrams, who is a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and a general oncologist at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. Abrams also provides integrative oncology consultations at the UCSF Osher Center for Integrative Medicine. At this Case Comprehensive Cancer Center event, he will present "Cannabis in Cancer Care." Learn more about the series at cancer.case.edu/events/semseries/.

About the speaker

Abrams is a graduate of Cleveland Heights High School. He received an AB in Molecular Biology from Brown University in 1972 and graduated from the Stanford University School of Medicine in 1977. After completing an internal medicine residency at the Kaiser Foundation Hospital in San Francisco, he became a fellow in hematology/oncology at the Cancer Research Institute of the University of California, San Francisco, in 1980. Abrams was one the original clinician/investigators to recognize and define many early AIDS-related conditions. He has long been interested in clinical trials of complementary and alternative medicine interventions for HIV/AIDS and cancer, including evaluations of medicinal marijuana. In 1997, he received funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) to conduct clinical trials of the short-term safety of cannabinoids in HIV infection. Subsequently, the University of California Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research granted him funds to continue studies of the effectiveness of cannabis in a number of clinical conditions. He completed a placebo-controlled study of smoked cannabis in patients with painful HIV-related peripheral neuropathy, as well as a study evaluating vaporization as a smokeless delivery system for medicinal. His last NIDA-funded trial investigated the possible pharmacokinetic interaction between vaporized cannabis and opioid analgesics in patients with chronic pain. He now is conducting a National Institutes of Health-funded trial investigating vaporized cannabis in patients with sickle cell disease. He co-authored the chapter on “Cannabinoids and Cancer” in Integrative Oncology (Oxford University Press), which he co-edited with Andrew Weil. He co-edits the National Cancer Institute’s Physician Data Query Complementary and Alternative Medicine cannabinoids and cancer website. He also was a member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine’s committee that published “The Health Effects of Cannabis and Cannabinoids: Current State of Evidence and Recommendations for Research” in January 2017.