America loves its football, and football fans love a big hit. For years, the National Football League (NFL) prepared promotional videos showing the biggest hits from each week – videos its network partners eagerly aired to gin up even more interest in the coming week’s games.
But those “big hits” were the genesis of a shameful legacy in the NFL: Concussions – and a terrifying disease called chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).
CTE is a degenerative brain disease brought on by too many big concussions received over the years. CTE causes memory problems, cognitive difficulties, and, eventually, even dementia.
To be fair, CTE is also a problem among combat military personnel, hockey players, soccer players, pro fighters, and others, but the CTE story broke in the NFL.
But there is no cure. In fact, it can’t even be diagnosed in a living brain; a post-mortem examination is needed to even find CTE.
And it has caused plenty of deaths. Several NFL players with CTE have committed suicide; a few have committed murder. Dozens of others have surrendered what should have been a happy retirement to a lifetime of pain and mental illness.
And the NFL almost surely knew. How could it not?
The league even paid a settlement in excess of $1 billion to avoid a trial in which evidence scheduled to be presented would have suggested just how much they knew… and when they knew it.
To its credit, the modern NFL is cleaning up its act. It has changed the rules to make concussions less frequent. It’s changed other rules to get players with head injuries out of games until they can pass concession-testing protocol.
But concussions will still occur, and some players will get enough concussions to get CTE.
But what if there were a cure? Even better, what if CTE could be prevented?
One company I know of is researching those very same questions. This firm is being advised by a retired NFL player with degrees from Harvard and Dartmouth.
This team aims to discover whether CTE can be cured or even prevented with cannabis.
The research is exciting – and promising. If this firm succeeds, it will do a tremendous amount of good.
And shareholders, of course, could clean up, too.
The One Company on the Trail of a Rogue Protein
A company called KannaLife Sciences Inc. has the idea to attack CTE right at the source. The company’s advisory board is full of doctors and researchers, as well as former Kansas City Chiefs placekicker Nick Lowery.
You see, there’s a broad consensus among scientists that repeated hits to the head cause an excess of something called tau proteins, even if they don’t know the exact mechanism that causes CTE.
These proteins occur naturally in all of our brains and hold together the nerves that connect brain cells to one another.
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The current best theory of what causes CTE is that a blow to the head can damage these connectors, called axons, setting the tau proteins to float freely in the brain.
After many such blows, the proteins can change shape and begin to “clump” in the brain. At some point, these clumps of proteins start to attract new proteins and spread even without new blows to the head.
That’s CTE in a nutshell.
The process of becoming ill takes a long time, which is why the symptoms of CTE do not start to appear until long after a person has stopped receiving blows to the head – after retirement from a pro football career, for example.
Now, KannaLife is working with two compounds to try to treat or even prevent CTE.
One is actually patented by the government. Patent No. 6630507 is owned by the National Institutes of Health and is called “Cannabinoids as Antioxidants and Neuroprotectants.”
KannaLife is the only cannabinoid therapeutics company with a license to this patent. The other patent Kannalife has developed itself.
The idea is to use these cannabinoid compounds to penetrate the blood/brain barrier and deliver treatment directly to the clumps of tau proteins. If KannaLife can break up those clumps or prevent them from growing and spreading, CTE will not develop.
KannaLife’s research is still in its very early stages, and the investing picture is complicated at the moment.
Right now, Kannalife is owned in part by Medical Marijuana Inc. (OTC: MJNA). Medical Marijuana is firming up plans to go public in one of the most appealing avenues open to U.S. marijuana firms, through a share exchange agreement with TYG Solutions Corp. (OTC: TYYG).
It is too early, in my opinion, to invest in the company… but it is absolutely worth watching closely.
And you can bet we will.
But KannaLife and CTE are only parts of the bigger story…
Cannabis Could Eventually Transform Human Health
It turns out that humans (and indeed most other animals) have an “endocannabinoid” system. That means we make cannabinoids naturally, ourselves, and we have a vast system of receptors that trigger our cells to take beneficial or harmful actions based on the signals those receptors get from cannabinoids.
Cannabinoids hold the promise to treat or even cure not only CTE, but seizures in a variety of diseases, inflammation, pain, bone diseases, and even cancer.
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The U.S. pharmaceutical market reported sales of $453 billion last year. Global sales reached an incredible $1 trillion.
Cannabis could disrupt a huge portion of that.
Looking at the list of symptoms and diseases cannabis might be able to treat, it’s no big stretch to imagine a $100 billion cannabis pharmaceutical market in just a few years and a much larger market further into the future.
I’ll have more to say about the endocannabinoid system and the massive financial opportunity it presents over the coming weeks.
For now, as you enjoy the start of the new NFL season, consider how many of its players – past and present – may benefit from cannabis in the years to come.
This $1.3 Million Profit Opportunity Is Unfolding at the Ballot Box
U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent earth-shattering announcement to support ending the federal ban on marijuana sent shockwaves throughout the legal cannabis industry.
And with a record 16 states voting on legalizing marijuana this November, it’s clear that the industry is headed for historic heights.
Time and again, we’ve witnessed this pattern – marijuana legalization passes, pot stocks take off, and early investors have the chance to mint millions.
But this news has the potential to spark even bigger profits than we’ve seen already… and could help you turn a small stake into a $1.3 million fortune.
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