Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/1482660
caregiver focus 23 cannapatientcare.com october 2022 | cannabis patient care alternative for their daughter. "So, at nine months old, Sophie took her first dose of can- nabis on camera," Ryan said. "There was THC in it, and she started having these miraculous occurrences in her body." Over time, Ryan watched as Sophie's immune system stayed strong. Sophie stopped needing blood transfusions after previously requiring nine of them, and her body just healed itself, which the doctors couldn't explain. "Her heal- ing ability after surgeries was unlike anything her neuro- surgeons had seen in their careers," Ryan said. "There was no visible swelling and bruising. Her health as a whole im- proved. She had failed seven chemotherapies and clinical trials up until a couple of years ago. It was then that I knew that there was something more." An Inspiration is Born What she witnessed with her young daughter inspired Ryan to create CannaKids (5), which was essentially a tincture compa- ny that serviced patients in California while providing dosing guidance to patients around the world. Ryan served as CEO and Josh was director of outside sales. "When I started seeing the efficacy in so many people for so many different diseases, cancer being one of them, I really wanted to understand more," Ryan said. That work with CannaKids led her to Dr. Anahid Jewett (6), the professor and director of Tumor Immunology Laboratory at UCLA Health, who agreed to help with Sophie right after her second brain surgery in 2018. "Dr. Jewett started studying Sophie's brain tissue. When she looked at Sophie's blood, she couldn't under- stand the immune function that she was seeing in a child that had brain cancer. And it was through that interaction that we be- came business partners, friends, and colleagues," Ryan said. "Now we're trying to change the world together." The Startling Discoveries This was a journey for Dr. Jewett as well. She had been saying that she wasn't the kind of doctor that wanted to face sick chil- dren. She wanted to stay in the laboratory, especially when it came to pediatrics because she found it difficult to bear witness to what was happening to these children who weren't really getting better. They were just being treated and allowed to remain status quo. "Cannabis was never even remotely on her radar," Ryan said. "She didn't believe that there was this great therapeutic value to it. But she has since completely changed her mind and now recommends that any patient who comes to us gets on cannabis." When Dr. Jewett started working on Sophie, she was amazed. "First of all, this is low-grade glioma and it's sup- posed to be low in growing tumors. I found that to be the complete opposite with Sophie. It was growing at a much fast- er pace in my laboratory," said Dr. Jewett. "The second thing was that when I was looking at her immune system, it was very different from what I had seen in cancer patients. So those two things made me not only interested to follow up, but also to understand why Sophie has the cancer with that level of immunity that she has." Dr. Jewett thought that the first thing she was going to find was a suppressed immune system in Sophie. "I saw the com- plete opposite of that. And so that was intriguing to me, and I wanted to follow up." Par t of why that was happening was the action of cer tain immune cells—the natural killer (NK) cells—which are lym- phocytes in the same family as T and B cells (7). But as cells of the immune system, NK cells are best known for killing vi- rally infected cells, and detecting and controlling early signs of cancer. The NK cells were "obliterating" the cancer cells in Sophie, explained Dr. Jewett. "NK cells were very important in tar- geting cancer stem cells, and those are the most aggressive cells," Dr. Jewett said. "If you can eliminate those cells, you can cure cancer, basically." Sophie was six years old at the time of Dr. Jewett's tests. Her NKs were functioning at five times the level of any healthy patient Dr. Jewett had studied in her 30-plus-year career (8). Dr. Jewett also found out that synthetic cannabinoids can target the same aggressive tumors. "It's mind boggling," Dr. Jewett said. "I would have never guessed that this could be the case, because I've looked at big chemo drugs and I've giv- en significant levels of chemo drugs, not only in the animal The Ryan family inside the White House in the Press Brief- ing Room during a private tour.