Slashdot Mirror
Cancer Fighting Drug Found in Dirt
firesquirt writes "From an article in LiveScience, the bark of certain yew trees can yield a medicine that fights cancer. Now scientists find the dirt that yew trees grow in can supply the drug as well, suggesting a new way to commercially harvest the medicine."
"Pharmaceutical company patents dirt; Critics claim prior art"
-William Brendel
... it's not all about yew, after all. It's the dirt from whence yew came, and where yew shall ultimately return....
In other news, astrophysicists have announced that they now know what all that dark matter is: it's stupidity.
...we discover these things that the Earth provides us, and yet we learn nothing of protecting it from ourselves.
Silly monkeys.
I HATE when people and even pseudoscientific articles talk about a medicine against "cancer". Hell, there is NO cancer. There are CANCERS. Lung cancer has a completly different nature than, say, bllod cancer, ot colon cancer, or skin cancer. Yes, all of them are chaotic grow of the cells, but their nature, symptoms, erradication and even cell behaviour is completly different. It's therefore naive to talk about a "cure for cancer". It's like saying: a drug against virus has been found. Hell! WHAT virus? They are all different!
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
When it turns out he is a shower dodger to avoid cancer.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Now this is what i call a cancer Treetment.
It's quite interesting to note that one of the species of yew mentioned (i assume the most useful at yielding the drug) has been classified as NT (Near threatened).
This basically means the species is "considered threatened with extinction in the near future". With such a large area of yew trees producing such a small amount of drug, careful measures are going to have to be taken so as not to kill off our new hope for a cancer cure. It's also quite interesting to note that the yew only grows to about 15metres, and so much smaller than what i would know as a (european) yew tree.
So much for our parents telling us not to eat dirt as kids.
*tch*
The things people throw away these days...
Summation 2
The headline makes it sound like a new wonder drug was found. According to the article, this drug was found in 1967. So it's been around for quite a while. They've just found that the soil around the trees end up with the drug in it to. Thus when they harvest the drug, they can harvest the soil to get more of it at one time. Nothing new cure wise, just a better way for drug companies to produce a product.
I was one of the guinea-pigs that tested it. It worked incredibly well, better than the alternative at the time which hadn't worked for me leaving me with a choice of taking part in the experiment or trying a large dose of the other medicine with little chance of success.
I'd heard at the time that it was becoming viable because they'd found a way of synthesising it using chemicals extracted from the needles of the tree, so reducing the impact on the tree. If they can get hold of it with less impact on the tree then that's great!
As a point to all those people who think of "natural remedies" as harmless and western medicine as evil: I was treated with yew tree bark and some fungus. These two nearly killed me even in the precisely controlled doses, doses that had been determined through the deaths of some thousand or so rats rather than trial and error on some thousand or so humans. Now many thousands of humans can be saved from what is quite a nasty death thanks to this new treatment.
Natural remedies are just the same as any other item taken into the body. They can be good, or can cause harm. Unfortunately in this case, animal experiments did work very well and in my opinion have caused net good.
It'll be dirt cheap for those who need it
Most people forget that all higher organisms depend heavily on micribiota for their survival. For example, most of the complex micronutrients (e.g. B-comlplex vitamins) in plants are generated in soil bacteria. For these drugs, look to the rhizobacteria as the source of the genes for these compounds. The commensal relationships these bacteria sustain with particular plant species could be important, but it's possible these things could be grown in vitro and yield a nice industrial solution.
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
So it seems those new age, tree-hugging hippies weren't "barking" mad after all. They "yew" what they were doing all along. And I guess that, as far as pharmaceutical companies are concerned, money does grow on trees after all. Hey, that's "tree" of a kind so far. I'd better stop now and see if I can afford a mortgage on a tree house.
Let the strip-mining operations to cure cancer begin!
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Yews control the medecine market.
Mostly random stuff.
Ok, I'm going to be silly and feed the anonymous troll...
Mostly, I agree with you; but, there are cases where the "tinfoil hat" IS the business decision that the twelve-year-old can grasp:
"Cure vs treatment". The profit motive (by itself) would far rather sell a treatment than a cure.
So they are hiding the cures because they want to sell a treatment? Who is hiding it? Who discovered it that has that motive? As I said before, NIH dollars fund the most basic research which leads to new biology/drugs. Pharma does a little of that, but most of their dollars go into the clinical trials. So the academic researcher working for NIH funds has *ZERO* motive to hide the cure. *ZERO*.
So your tin-foil-hat theory rests on the key discovery being made by smaller amount of primary research being done in Pharma companies. Who do you think does the research, runs the bench experiments, crunches the numbers in those Pharma companies? Is it the high-end management who stands to make a killing from corporate profits? No. It's done be Ph.D. scientists and lab techs. A decent sized group of them.
Do you honestly think someone lab tech with a B.S. biology degree is going to be paid enough money to shut up about some great disease cure that is found by their group?
How about the Ph.D.'s in the group? Earning a Ph.D. is a long long haul. Most folks doing that are pretty smart and could have made much more money going to business school if making money was their number one priority. Most scientists care about knowledge, care about cures, and yes, like the prestige and recognition for making a major discovery. How likely is it they are going to keep a disease cure secret so the top management can get big bonuses? Not very freaking likely.
Even if some would do it, all it would take is one in the group to leak it. Keeping secrets in groups just doesn't work very well. Now stop to think what if a friend/family-member/loved-one of a member group has the disease? Not that unlikely with any decent sized lab group. Still think they are going to keep a cure secret? Please.
But as an example, consider the minor ailment athlete's foot. It's a huge industry. It's a fungus. It's absolutely not impossible to get rid of. But you will get marketed treatments, not cures (it'll cure the fungus on your foot, but you'll quickly get reinfected from your shoes, socks, shower, and so on; and they don't ever try to sell you anything to fix the problem once and for all. Doing so would be a poor business decision.) People don't have it in Japan, hence, no huge stinky-foot industry either. From a business point of view this is just lost profits!
Umm, Bullshit. Where do you tinfoil hat nutters come up with this stuff. Yes, they get athlete's foot in Japan. Need me to google for you? http://www.japancorp.net/Article.Asp?Art_ID=12391 Now, if you want to claim Japan has a lower incidence, I might believe you because I've never bothered to look up the statistics. However if that is in fact the case, that might be due to a more rigorous cleaning of public pools/showers, (places where it is most likely to be transmitted) in Japan than in the states. Not some secret cure that the American pharm companies are hiding from us.
Anti-bacterial drugs are relatively easy to make because you can often simply target the cell wall. Fungi are eukaryotes, like humans, and don't have a cell wall. One of the problems that comes along with that is that drugs that damage fungus, also tend to damage humans. Lamisil is a drug you often see marketed on TV. Take enough of it and it is absolutely guaranteed to cure your Athlete's foot. The cure is not hidden from you at all. The problem is it may well also kill your liver before all the athlete's foot is gone. Fungi are hard to kill without killing human cells. Ask any researcher who has had to deal with fungus in their tissue culture.