Accidental Blogger

New approaches to cancer therapy now include complementary / integrative treatments which take into consideration innovations in nutrition, psychology and combination of different traditions of medicine. The combination drugs are very often a mix of Chinese medicine, Ayurveda, traditional herbs etc. and radio-chemo therapy. Leading cancer research and treatment centers such as M.D. Anderson in Houston provide information on the effects of supplements like curcumin on tumor shrinkage. Wednesday’s Houston Chronicle reports that researchers at M.D. Anderson are now looking beyond herbs and plants for combination treatment. They are testing animal products used in traditional medicine for their efficacy in cancer therapy.

A Houston hospital known for seeking the most advanced cancer therapies that modern science can develop is turning its attention to a centuries-old Chinese treatment: toad venom.

Scientists from the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center are investigating whether the stuff that some types of toads use to sicken their natural predators can also be a healer, as doctors of traditional Chinese medicine have long believed.

"Without hesitation, toad venom was the No. 1 drug (Chinese) doctors mentioned when we asked them to suggest the best natural cancer medicines to test," Lorenzo Cohen, director of M.D. Anderson’s integrative medicine program, said from China. "It may sound wild to Americans, but it’s accepted as a standard of care here."

It also appears to hold promise. In clinical trials Cohen is leading in Shanghai, the venom secreted by the Asiatic toad has shown some benefit and no apparent side effects in patients with advanced liver, pancreatic and lung cancer — which are not easy cancers to fight.

Cohen said he hopes to bring the drug to Houston to test on M.D. Anderson patients in a couple of years. It already has been tested successfully in laboratory and mouse studies at the cancer center.

The research, funded by the National Cancer Institute, is part of an M.D. Anderson program to determine whether alternative therapies can be integrated with accepted Western practices. In his work in the program, Cohen makes frequent trips to China.

One expert said he was impressed that M.D. Anderson would take up the research of toad venom, or ChanSu, as it’s known in China.

"In terms of clinical research, we’re in the infancy of testing herbs, much less animal products," said Ted Kaptchuk, a Harvard professor of medicine and author of The Web That Has No Weaver: Understanding Chinese Medicine.

"Animal products tend to make scientists queasy," he said, "to be seen as possibly culturally influenced, as if they’re hocus-pocus."