Faculty of Arts & Science

University of Lethbridge researchers are looking at the potential for cannabis compounds to treat or even prevent Alzheimer’s disease, as well as to track and possibly stop abnormal proteins from spreading damage in the brain with $1.8 million in funding grants from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR).

Dr. Robert McDonald and his team at the U of L’s Canadian Centre for Behavioural Neuroscience (CCBN), will use preclinical animal models to investigate marijuana compounds as potential treatments for Alzheimer’s disease.

In the other project, Dr. Robert Sutherland and his team at the CCBN will use an animal model to look more closely at two misfolded proteins associated with Alzheimer’s disease — amyloid beta and tau.

Mootookakio’ssin, at its simplest description, is a project to create detailed images of historical Blackfoot objects housed in British museums. At its most complex, it is creating a virtual home for Indigenous objects, a place to reactivate the Blackfoot relations within them and transfer that knowledge all the way from Britain back to their peoples in southern Alberta.

After two years of research, construction and creation, this collaborative project between University of Lethbridge and UK researchers, led by Blackfoot advisors and elders, is coming to fruition, culminating in presentations, exhibitions, workshops, and the launch of the digital object microsite in summer 2021, to be housed in the Blackfoot Digital Library.

Attached photo: Melissa Shouting leads a beading workshop in the U of L Art Gallery (pre COVID-19).

After receiving international attention, two University of Lethbridge studies that explored the potential for certain cannabis extracts to be used as additional therapies to combat COVID-19 have undergone peer review and have now been published in Aging, a top, open-access, bio-medical journal.

The studies by Drs. Igor and Olga Kovalchuk, both U of L biology professors, were conducted in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. They investigated the ways specific Cannabis sativa extracts could be used as adjunct treatments for COVID-19. With the need to get relevant research out as quickly as possible to help combat the pandemic, their findings were originally released as preprints. The studies, In search of preventive strategies and Fighting the storm  found that certain cannabis extracts, including those high in cannabidiol (CBD), help prevent the SARS-CoV-2 virus from entering cells and help ward off cytokine storms that can lead to acute respiratory distress syndrome. High-CBD cannabis extracts are not psychoactive.