A provincial council in the Netherlands will invest about $1.65 million in a company that is working on a vaporization system involving cannabis-impregnated pads.
The company, Spirocan, hopes to complete development next year and then begin clinical trials on patients, company spokesman Pieter Andre de la Porte told the Financieele Dagblad.
Spirocan said it needs a total investment of about $11 million to develop the vaporizer.
The company is partly owned by Bedrocan, which has provided pharmaceutical grade cannabis to the Dutch government since 2003 and has licensed cultivation operations in Canada.
Spirocan is also backed by the country’s Office of Medical Cannabis and Zorg Innovatives Nederland, a healthcare products and services company.
Medical marijuana use in the Netherlands has increased 45% this year from 2014. The country’s Foundation for Pharmaceutical Studies has recorded more than 11,000 medical marijuana prescriptions since 2012.
Many other companies have tried – yet failed – to register cannabis as an official medicine, Financieele Dagblad pointed out.
