Aurora Cannabis Inc (NASDAQ:ACB) is a major Canadian cannabis producer operating across five continents. On February 11, 2019, ACB reported earnings for the quarter ending December 31, 2018. The company noted with earnings that it currently had "40 clinical trials and case studies completed or in progress," an achievement which forms part of the bull case on ACB. In this article I look into those clinical studies to see if there is indeed something to get excited about for ACB bulls or if these trials just represent filler material.
What trials is ACB running?
When we look into ACB's corporate slide deck, we do find a slide covering a selection of clinical trials but the actual details provided are quite minimal.
Figure 1: ACB appears to be running trials across a number of indications including conditions where cannabis has seen success previously such as epilepsy and pain. Source: ACB corporate presentation for March 2019.
I worked on digging up listings for these trials so we might actually have an idea what might come of them.
The Cannabis Extract in Refractory Epilepsy Study (CERES)
The most important trial to look into is the one the furthest down the pipeline, a phase 3 study in epilepsy being conducted with the Ontario Brain Institute, among other collaborators. The clinicaltrials.gov listing for that trial, referred to as CERES, notes the trial has an estimated primary completion date of January 2021 (the study only started in January 2019). That means the results from this trial are certainly not a near-term catalyst.
The study is a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled study of capsules of CBD and THC oil vs placebo, as an add on to standard anti-epileptic drugs, in patients with drug-resistant epilepsy. The phase 3 study will enroll patients with Dravet syndrome and Lennox-Gastaut syndrome, two seizure disorders where the efficacy of
