Irish pharmaceutical cannabis manufacturer Dunbar Pharmaceuticals has today launched the first plant-derived dronabinol active ingredient into the UK market.
In partnership with leading Specials manufacturer IPS Pharma, Dunbar’s ‘WaterClear THC’ products are now available to clinicians across the UK for the first time.
Dronabinol, the international non-proprietary name for delta-9-THC in purified pharmaceutical form, was one of the earliest cannabis-based medicines to be prescribed in major medical markets and has been approved in the US for chemotherapy-induced nausea in 1985.
Until now, however, commercial-scale supply of the drug has been almost entirely synthetic. Dunbar’s ‘WaterClear’ range, now available as 5 mg and 10 mg oral capsules, a 25 mg/mL oral spray and a 25 mg/mL oily dropper solution, is ‘plant-derived’.
Manufactured under Health Products Regulatory Authority oversight at its EU-GMP facility in Athlone, Ireland, Dunbar’s product is a chemically defined, pharmacopoeia-grade active ingredient produced from plant starting material rather than through chemical synthesis.
The result is a single-molecule product that behaves like a conventional pharma compound, with predictable milligram dosing and minimal compositional variability, while sidestepping the cost and intellectual-property walls around the incumbent synthetic routes.
Dunbar is Ireland’s first EU GMP-certified manufacturer of plant-derived cannabinoid active ingredients, according to certification held on the EudraGMDP register.
Beyond flower
“Many patients cannot or do not wish to inhale cannabinoid medicines, and they should have access to suitable alternatives,” Leah Fletcher, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Dunbar Pharma, said in a press release.
“By manufacturing at commercial scale in Ireland to EU GMP standards, we can provide partners such as IPS Pharma with a consistent, reliable supply of dronabinol for oral formulations. This is how cannabinoid therapy becomes an accepted part of medicine rather than a category apart.”
Leah Fletcher, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Dunbar Pharma
It comes amid a visible shift toward pharma-grade cannabinoid formulations across European markets. In Germany, where Dunbar entered earlier in 2026, the category that includes dronabinol recorded more statutory health insurance prescriptions than cannabis flower over the course of 2025.
The company was founded on the argument that the cannabis industry’s growth had outpaced the pharmaceutical infrastructure sitting behind it. Speaking to Business of Cannabis, Fletcher said Dunbar’s model was built around supplying ‘very, very standardised APIs’ into both the cannabis market and traditional pharma, working with select partners in each jurisdiction to meet local regulatory requirements.
The Athlone facility keeps testing, stability and R&D in-house and sits in the same industrial park as Jazz Pharmaceuticals, Alexion and Novartis.
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What the UK can learn from Germany
Fletcher argues the shift is one regulators find easier to back than the alternatives. “It’s much easier for a regulator to say, ‘Well, make it be pharma,’ because the systems are in place for pharma.”
Ireland is ‘very, very good at pharma’, she added, having spent decades funding pharmaceutical infrastructure and, through Enterprise Ireland’s backing of Dunbar, is now extending that support into cannabinoid manufacturing. “They want jobs. They want access. They want medicines. They want pharma.”
Fletcher argued that the UK’s regulatory route is still lagging behind more flexible markets like Germany, ultimately to the detriment of the patients. Paradoxically, the UK’s tighter regulatory posture, designed to protect patients, is now the thing constraining what those patients can access.
“The flexibility in Germany tends to offer more patient access and better product for the patient than it does in the UK,” she said.
UK Specials manufacturers must allocate 90 days to a patient-specific prescription and cannot compound in anticipation of demand, whereas German pharmacies operating under the country’s magisterial preparation route can ‘manufacture ahead of time once they know how many prescriptions they did last month and the last before.’
Stability data generated for the German market does not transfer easily into the UK framework either, meaning options open to prescribers in Berlin remain closed to those in London.
“Because the framework is written for Specials and not cannabis,” Fletcher said, “we lose out on really good things that we could be doing.”
The UK launch lands ahead of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs’ expected review of medical cannabis, which Fletcher said she hopes will produce ‘more structure, more rigour, and clear guidelines for people supplying to the market.’
