This Catalyst Could Turn Cannabics Pharmaceuticals Inc (OTCMKTS:CNBX) Around

Cannabics Pharmaceuticals Inc (OTCMKTS:CNBX) is down close to 45% on price 30 days ago and currently trades for less than $0.08 a share at a market capitalization of just $84 million. Sentiment is decidedly weak right now (especially among those shareholders that accumulated at or around the February spike, which saw the company run toward $7 a share) and all the momentum looks to be with the shorts.There’s a relatively near-term catalyst set to hit press, however, that could turn this company around.Many of our regular readers will know that this is one we have looked at in the past. We won’t go into our coverage in too much detail here, but in a nutshell, we like the company. It’s working in some promising areas in a growing space and – unlike many of the other so-called cannabis stocks vying for shareholder capital right now – it’s actually advancing its various programs towards revenue stage.Against a backdrop of this operational progress, however, the company’s share price has spent the last couple of months in freefall.For those new to the company, it’s a healthcare cannabis play that’s trying to develop various treatments, through various combinations of active marijuana compounds, to treat (primarily) cancer-related conditions. Some of the company’s programs are going after the underlying disease – i.e. trying to show that cannabis can have anti-cancer properties and induce apoptosis in cancerous cells. Other programs are going after the symptom side of oncology – nausea and vomiting, chemo induced conditions, appetite loss, all that sort of thing. This latter category is already covered pretty widely by the medical cannabis space but it’s incredibly fragmented in terms of distribution, treatment type, and dose. Patients have to smoke or eat the cannabis to get the clinical benefit. Cannabics is trying to overcome this drawback with its palliative program and it’s this program that’s set to serve up the catalyst that we think might bring about a longer-term reversal in fortunes.Specifically, the company has developed cannabis-based pills and it’s currently testing them as a potential therapy for what’s called cancer anorexia-cachexia syndrome (CACS). It’s a wasting type illness that many cancer patients suffer from and it’s characterized by loss of skeletal muscle and fat. Right now, it’s pretty poorly defined in the medical space (many incorrectly think it’s synonymous with starvation) and there’s no cure for the condition. It can be incredibly painful, lead to loss of appetite (which then compounds the severity of the CACS) and translates to a poor quality of life for the patient in question.Cannabics is trying to show that its cannabis pills (at a fixed dosage) can lead to an improvement in QoL.The study (the protocol is here for anyone interested) isn’t set to wrap up until December this year and full completion isn’t slated until April next year. However, it kicked off in November 2016 and – as per the company’s statement in this Registration Filing – management expects to have preliminary data from the investigation in hand at the start of July this year.If the data is positive (we expect it will address the first batch of patients, totaling 20 or so) then the company is going to run on the news.So what are we looking for?The primary endpoint is weight gain of ≥10% from baseline weight, as assessed by weighing the patient every two weeks in the first month, every month in the next two months, and every six weeks in the next three months. It’s open label, so the definition of an endpoint hit is pretty simple – if the patients gain 10% or more from baseline over the period, it’s a hit. The more patients that gain this amount (there’s 40 in total but we think only about half of these, at the high end, will be available for evaluation at this early stage), the better the data and the further this stock is going to run.We will be updating our subscribers as soon as we know more. For the latest updates on CNBX, sign up below!Disclosure: We have no position in CNBX and have not been compensated for this article.