One of the latest ‘miracle’ cancer cures hails from China

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One of. the latest ‘miracle’ cancer cures hails from China

 

 

http://www.i-sis.org.uk/GCM2.php

 

 

One of the latest ‘miracle’ cancer cures hails from China, and it is

Kanglaite, a preparation made from a traditional staple food. It

highlights the nature of Chinese remedies and the Chinese approach to

health. Dr. Mae-Wan Ho reports.

 

 

 

Pharmacologist Li Dapeng began extracting the anticancer compounds out

of the seeds of Job’s tears (Coix lachryma-jobi) (Box 1) and

experimenting with the compounds since 1975. Twenty years later, he won

his government’s approval to market an extract he calls Kanglaite, to

help fight cancer and to reduce the side effects of conventional

treatments. Li Dapeng has set up his own company in Hanzhou, the Zhejian

Kanglaite Pharmaceutical Company Ltd, in order to market the drug.

 

Box 1

 

Chinese pearl barley the latest cancer cure

 

It has long been suspected that the low cancer rates in southeast China

could be due to a dietary staple in the region, Coix lachryma-jobi, or

Jobs’s tears, a relative of maize.

 

The species appears to be widely distributed throughout the world. The

seeds, shaped like tear drops and coloured greyish white to dark brown,

are often used as beads in necklaces because they come with a

perforating hole from one end to the other. When shelled, the kernel is

white and looks like barley; and indeed, is referred to as such. Its

Chinese name, yi-yi-jen, or yi-mi (in southeast China) is the same as

that used for barley, or yang-yi-mi, ‘yang’ meaning ‘foreign’, or

‘across the ocean’.

 

Yi-mi is used in soups and porridges and is a common ingredient in many

herbal medicines for treating a variety of ailments including cancer. It

has also been widely used as a diuretic, analgesic and antispasmodic

agent.

 

 

Kanglaite has gone through a four-month clinical trial on 15 to 18

volunteers in a hospital in Salt Lake City, Utah, making it the first

drug derived from a traditional Chinese herbal remedy to go into

clinical trials in the United States. The drug is patented in China,

United States, Canada, Japan and the European Union.

 

No one knows exactly how Kanglaite works, but the drug has been taken by

more than 270 000 patients in some 2000 hospitals in China, and has

proven effective against malignant tumours such as carcinomas in the

lung, liver, stomach and breast.

 

It appears to fight cancer on many fronts. Apart from inhibiting the

growth of cancer cells and killing them directly, it also stimulates

immune functions that get rid of cancer cells, and improves the quality

of life for cancer patients by decreasing cancer pain and prevents the

loss of body weight. It has no harmful side effects on vital functions

of the heart, liver, kidney and blood. It reduces toxic side effects of

radio- and chemotherapy, and increases the effectiveness of these

conventional treatments. When used in combination with surgical

intervention, it helps kill tumour cells. It is, to all intent and

purposes, the perfect cancer cure, so it is claimed (see Box 2).

 

Box 2

 

How Kanglaite works

 

Studies published in a collection from Zhejiang University Press and

elsewhere claim that Kanglaite has the following effects.

 

Inhibits mitosis of tumour cells during G2/M phase of the cell cycle.

Induces death of tumour cells.

Increases expression of genes – FAS, Apo-1 – that inhibits the growth of

cancer cells and represses expression of the gene Bel-2 that promotes

the growth of cancer cells.

Inhibits formation of new blood vessels that promote tumour growth.

Counteracts weight loss due to cancer.

Reverses multi-resistance of tumour cells to anti-tumour drugs.

 

 

At the beginning of 2003, FDA approved a phase II trial on non

small-cell lung cancer, a hitherto untreatable cancer once it has gone

past the very early stages when surgical intervention is feasible.

 

But what exactly is Kanglaite?

 

Kanglaite is a " neutral lipid fraction " extracted using organic solvents

in a several purification steps (see Box 3) and formulated as an

injection for patients. It is a mixture of rather ordinary lipids, the

precise role of each of which in the large spectrum of effects remains

unknown.

 

Box 3

 

What is Kanglaite?

 

Kanglaite is the " neutral lipid " of the endosperm of Job’s tears,

extracted with an organic solvent, such as acetone, and further refined

and washed in several simple steps, then combined with glycerol and

lecithin from soy or egg to make an emulsion in water that can be

injected intravenously into patients.

 

The anti-tumour action of lipids extracted from the endosperm of Job’s

tears was known much earlier: it was reported for the first time by

Japanese scientists Tyunosin Ukita and Ako Tanumura in 1961, and again

in the 1980s by Chinese scientist, Si Pei-hai. But the earlier extracts

were not economical enough for the market, and the formulations were not

pure enough for clinical use.

 

The " neutral lipid " turns out to be a rather unremarkable mixture of

triglycerides (over 90%) with smaller amounts of diglycerides (about

1.5%), monoglycerides (about 6 %) and alkylacylacetin (about 1%). These

lipids have a rather ordinary profile of saturated and unsaturated

long-chain fatty acids (16 and 18 carbons).

 

Despite the wide spectrum of benefits claimed for the " neutral lipid " ,

based both on in vitro studies in cell cultures and in vivo studies in

mice, and later in human subjects, it is unclear whether different

components of the mixture are responsible for specific effects, or it is

the mixture per se that has all those effects.

 

 

There is a strong underlying assumption, nevertheless, that the

different effects are due to different components in the grain, and

indeed, a number of pharmacologically and physiologically active

substances have been isolated from different parts of the Coix plant

that show specific anti-inflammatory, anti-tumour, anti-microbial,

hypoglycaemic, and ovulatory effects.

 

A team of researchers at the National Taiwan University has recently

identified 6 phenolic compounds in the hull (shell) of Job’s tears that

have strong anti-oxidant activities. The researchers showed that

different parts of the grain vary in their content of anti-oxidants,

with the greatest amounts in the hull, followed by the testa (seed

membrane) and the bran, and the smallest amounts in the polished grain.

And the six phenolic compounds also had different degrees of

anti-oxidant effects.

 

Antioxidants inhibit the oxidation of lipids in cell membranes, leading

to impairment of cell function. Antioxidants neutralise reactive oxygen

species (ROS) and oxygen free radicals. Excess ROS is implicated in

diseases such as inflammation, aging, atherosclerosis (hardening of the

arteries), cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, and liver toxicity. (See

Organic agriculture helps fight cancer, ISIS report.)

 

Despite these clear successes, however, there are critics who claim,

justifiably, that the present penchant for extracting and purifying

herbal medicine is anathema to the very tradition of Chinese medicine.

Chinese herbal medicines frequently involve not just the single

unprocessed herb, but especially mixtures of many herbs in different

proportions, according to the needs of individual patients (see

Globalising Chinese medicine, this series). The aim is to restore the

patient to physiological balance that’s synonymous with the state of

health.

 

The experience of conventional Western medicine has amply demonstrated

that knowing the molecular mechanisms of a compound is no guarantee that

it will have the desired benefit for the organism, for the simple reason

that all parts of the organism are interconnected and

intercommunicating. Nevertheless, knowledge of molecular mechanisms can

contribute to understanding the whole, once we stop seeing the organism

as a collection of separate molecular nuts and bolts. Besides,

identifying the different components in a mixture could contribute to

quality assurance and standardisation, discouraging forgeries and

malpractice in medications that are going to be increasingly important

for global healthcare.

 

In view of the numerous health benefits of this widely distributed

staple food, why not incorporate the Coix grain into everyone’s diet? It

serves to bring home the most distinctive aspect of traditional Chinese

medicine: good nutrition is indistinguishable from health promotion, and

food shades insensibly into medicine that’s widely available and

affordable.

 

I believe that the tension between the analytical reductionist and the

synthetic holistic approaches will be resolved in the spirit of the

organic materialism and eclectic pragmatism characteristic of the

Chinese culture through the ages (see Traditional Chinese medicine &

contemporary western science, this series).

 

The more important tension is between corporations that want to extract

maximum profit from patented medicines and the health needs of ordinary

people as well as the danger of over-harvesting of wild plant species.