Sweet wormwood plant based cancer treatment

We’ve all seen movies where certain indigenous people mix up a cocktail of some plants and come up with a cure for practically anything. It seems that Hollywood is not always wrong. Scientists at the University of Washington are currently updating a traditional Chinese medicine in order to create a drug that is more than 1200 times more efficient in killing cancer cells than the drugs currently available in medicine. This means that a new chemotherapy drug with minimal side effects can be created in the future.

This new compound is based on a currently available drug for malaria, called artemisinin. This drug, artemisinin, is derived from the sweet wormwood plant. Chinese medicine has been using this plant in herbs for the past couple of millenniums and some Asian countries eat it in their salads.

Scientists have modified artemisinin so that it selectively targets cancer cells and spars cells that are healthy. The online journal Cancer Letters has published this result in it’s Oct. 5 edition.

UW’s chemistry professor and senior author of this study, Tomikazu Sasaki stated : “The compound is like a special agent planting a bomb inside the cell,”.

Cancer cells develop from normal cells. That makes it hard drugs to detect which cell is normal and which is cancerous. The average chemotherapy drug destroys one normal cell for each 5 to 10 cancer cell killed. This is why chemotherapy has so devastating side effects at the moment.

But in the study conducted by UW researchers, the artemisinin-based compound was highly selective at specifically destroying human leukemia cells. The study has also presented preliminary results that proved the compound to be just as effective and selective for breast and prostate cancer cells. This new compound has kills only one healthy cell for each 12000 cancer cells destroyed.

“Side effects are a major limitation to current chemotherapies,” Sasaki said. “Some patients even die from them.”

The math is really simple : if you have a drug that kills less healthy cells, you can take more of it and thus destroy more cancer cells.

But how does this drug work ? Normal cells need iron, but not as much as cancer cells. Because too much iron is toxic, when a cell needs iron, it constructs a special protein signal on it’s surface. The body delivers iron, along with a protein package that shields it. Then the cell swallows the iron along with it’s protein package.

But cancer cells need much more iron to maintain the rapid division they need in order to make the tumor grow. The thing is artemisinin is toxic when it is aided by iron and doesn’t do damage otherwise. Artemisinin alone kills a hundred healthy cell for each healthy cell. In order to improve that ratio, researchers added a small chemical that makes artemisinin stick to the protein package. The cancer cell does not recognize the toxic compound of the protein package, waits for the body to deliver the iron and the swallows everything : iron, proteins and toxic compound

The compound is like a little bomb-carrying monkey riding on the back of a Trojan horse,” said Henry Lai, UW bioengineering professor and co-author of the study. “Cancer cells get sloppy at maintaining free iron, so they are more sensitive to artemisinin,” Sasaki said.

Most current drugs attack specific cancer cells, but due to the way the artemisinin compound works, it can be used against any kind of cancer cells. With only several years away from human trials, we have hope that cancer can be treated faster and better.