TORONTO, Feb. 04, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- PRESS RELEASE -- Aleafia Health Inc. has appointed Dr. Graham Merry as the company’s first Product Data Science Fellow. Leveraging the company’s proprietary 10 million point medical cannabis patient dataset, Merry will lead Aleafia Health’s ongoing medical cannabis research. These efforts will be aimed at developing evidence-based, proprietary treatment methods and products for chronic illnesses including pain, insomnia, anxiety and eating disorders.
Aleafia Health generated $0.6 million in research revenue in Q3 2018 alone, fueled primarily by medical cannabis companies subscribing to Aleafia Health’s proprietary medical cannabis patient dataset. Aleafia Health tracks all patient interactions with referring doctors, nurse practitioners and educators from diagnosis, treatment, monitoring and continuous learning. The highly differentiated medical cannabis patient big data leverages an enterprise-wide proprietary platform data set on Amazon AWS with market leading data visualization and business insights tools powered by Google Data Studio. These tools are uniquely configured based on over 50,000 unique patients.
Merry graduated in Medicine from The Royal London Medical College in London, U.K and is the founder of Photospectra Health Sciences Inc. which focuses on the research and development of treatments for Age-Related Dry Macular Degeneration, a common eyesight disorder. He has instigated, been a principal investigator and published clinical trials internationally.
The appointment of the Product Data Science Fellow is part of a global initiative by Aleafia Health to build an integrated, scalable cannabis consumer experience, leveraging the company’s in-house, executive leadership experience at multi-billion dollar eCommerce and IT companies.
“Aleafia Health continues to accelerate our purpose of helping people live better lives through a unique, scalable cannabis consumer experience. We will enable patients to navigate seamlessly through, cannabis education, illness specific questionnaires, medical cannabis script product purchasing, order subscription management and treatment/titration monitoring,” said Aleafia Health CEO Geoffrey Benic. “We look forward to Dr. Merry leading our research efforts and team and making significant contributions to evidence based medicine.”
“The medical and research teams at Aleafia Health are extremely well positioned today with the addition of Dr. Merry. We will continue to make important contributions to the research of medical cannabis treatment best practices and product development,” said Aleafia Chief Medical Officer Dr. Michael Verbora.
Current Aleafia Health research initiatives include an insomnia study in partnership with Cronos Group, a cannabinoid pharmacogenetics study with Guided 420 Genetics and U.S. based AKESOgen, and a recently published study in the journal Cannabis and Cannabinoid Research on cannabis and benzodiazepines.
“I am very excited to be involved in clinical research helping Aleafia realize its goals and ambitions to improve the lives of patients. I have been tremendously impressed with the whole team at Aleafia while working in this field,” said Merry. “This initiative will allow the opportunity to obtain clinical evidence to validate and gain wider acceptance in the medical community realizing the benefits of cannabinoid treatment in serious and debilitating disease. Together we will make a huge difference in addressing the unmet needs of patients in this emerging field of medicine.”
Aleafia Health has also announced the appointment of Dr. Taylor Lougheed as Physician Lead for QI/QA of Clinic Operations. Lougheed has an extensive history in cannabinoid prescribing as the lead physician at the Canabo Medical Clinic in Ottawa, and holds a Master’s degree in Healthcare Quality from Queen’s University. Lougheed will help drive efficiencies across a growing clinic network and leverage Aleafia proprietary research data to optimize clinical decision making to maximize cannabinoid therapy outcomes for patients.
