14
votes
Cannabis compounds show promise as topical antifungals
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- Title
- Topical CBD quickly and effectively kills off deadly fungal infections
- Authors
- Depositphotos
- Published
- Jun 14 2025
- Word count
- 849 words
Reading the study this is still very much in "works on a petri dish" stage. (They did also do tests with wax moth larvae, to be totally fair) Because, as they point out, cannabis extract is so safe for humans this would be fantastic to see it effective in mammal trials so I hope this line of research gets attention.
This is interesting. I am curious, as the article states, "As is the case with antibiotics, there is a growing worldwide resistance to antifungal drugs that poses a risk to human health."
Does this not mean that humans could also develop a resistance to this too?
Not an evolutionary biologist, but AFAIK the way drug resistance builds up in bacteria, viruses, and fungi takes many many many generations since it relies on natural selection. E.g. Imagine we use a particular antibiotic and it kills 99.999% of an infectious bacteria, but the 0.001% that survives might have done so because they have a slightly higher resistance to it. That particular strain of bacteria is then more likely to propagate, potentially leading to them becoming the dominant strain of the next generation. Repeat that same scenario hundreds/thousands/millions of times, and instead of the antibiotic killing 99.999% of the bacteria it eventually may only kill a small enough percentage that it's effectively rendered useless for treating said infection.
Organisms larger than a single cell, like humans, don't really work like that though since our generational divide isn't hours/days/weeks, it's decades. We're also not killing off 99.999% of our population with cannabinoids exposure so there is no significant evolutionary pressure for our species to develop a resistance to its effects. :P
My understanding is that with bacteria specifically it's more complicated, as at least some bacteria have the ability to swap genes with each other and thus genes can spread through means other than reproduction. But afaik fungi cannot do that, so development of resistance to antifungals is probably through the natural selection process as you described.