Cultivating a local cure for cancer
Despite playing host to more than 20,000 plant species, Australia has only produced five healing plant products since European colonisation. Tim Entwisle takes a look at a recent success and looks to Indigenous knowledge for future advancements.
Plants have been a major source of medicine for thousands of years, from bush and herbal remedies through to the scientific discovery of aspirin, quinine and morphine. In fact, the first botanic gardens were physic gardens, neatly ordered collections of plants that cure us.
Our own gardens are full of medicines. Daffodil bulbs gave us a treatment for Alzheimer’s, deadly nightshade berries can kill but also relax muscular spasms, and the leaves of the yew were the first source of taxol, a chemical used to treat breast cancer. Many of these chemicals are now synthesised in the laboratory, but they were first detected, identified and isolated from plants.
Macadamia is often cited as the one truly successful native plant product, but that was only after the tree was farmed in Hawaii.
Professor Pearn reminded me recently that while there was great enthusiasm when Europeans first arrived in Australia for what they saw as a rich botanical bounty, there are actually very few foods that have been mass marketed from Australian plants.
Macadamia is often cited as the one truly successful native plant product, but that was only after the tree was farmed in Hawaii.
In regard to healing plants, my European forebears were largely blind to the obvious. From an extensive Indigenous pharmacopeia, early settlers extracted gum from eucalypts (our first export in 1788) and applied tea-tree oil as an antiseptic.
Later, macadamia oil was used as a (fairly trivial) nutritional supplement and we now pop pills with hyoscine from the Australian Corkwood (Duboisia) to prevent travel sickness. That’s four products from a flora of over 20,000 species. Professor Pearn estimates that most Aboriginal tribes would have recognised and used at least 600 medicinal plants from their local area.
Perhaps things are changing. In 1997 another Queensland scientist, Professor Jim Alwayrd, listened to his mother when she said a weed in her garden cured skin complaints and he should check it out. Check it out he did, and last year I was able to buy on prescription cream developed from this plant to treat a number of minor skin complaints.
The plant is a milkweed called Euphorbia peplus. It's a small herb native to northern Africa, Europe and western Asia but is now found around the world, including much of southern and eastern Australia (it’s doing quite nicely in my backyard). It arrived in Australia shortly after European settlement and has become a common weed of gardens, paths and crops.
The plant is soft and bright green, grows up to about 20 centimetres tall, with oval or spade-shaped leaves and umbrella-like clusters of green flowers or fruits at the top. The stems are usually reddish at the base.
I'm sure you've pulled them out of your brick work or path at some time. Its common names include petty spurge or, along with lots of other ‘euphorbs’ (members of the plant family Euphorbiaceae), milkweed. It's even called by some, cancer weed—in a curative rather than causative sense I presume—or radium weed. I'm presuming 'radium' again refers to its powers of good, rather than evil.
I should point out here that the plant is poisonous to humans and to many animals, and should not be ingested. Although unspecified mild doses have been shown to work as a laxative, you might keep in mind that 17th century herbalist Nicholas Culpeper described its action as 'working violently by vomit and stool'.
As with most euphorbs, skin contact with the milky sap can cause dermatitis. Ironically, that same sap has been used for centuries to cure skin problems, particularly warts. There are plenty of reports of people applying it direct from the stem to fix all kinds of blemishes and more serious ailments, and many have dobbed a dab of white latex from this plant onto a wart just to see what happens.
However, although it’s more expensive, you should only use the registered product, Picato, with its clinically tested and precise dosage of the active ingredients. I certainly wasn’t going to experiment with my face.
After 12 years of research Professor Aylward was able to identify and demonstrate the efficacy of the milkweed his mother had used as a home remedy for treating sunspots.
The active compound, Ingenol mebute, kills rapidly dividing and growing cells of the kind you find in a sunspot or potentially cancerous cluster. By 2009 clinical trials were underway, and in 2013 the product was released for general use in the form of three tiny tubes of gel to be applied one each day for three days.
Late last year, after 15 days of sporting a rather ruddy complexion, my own face became blotch and cancer free, at least for a now.
Professor Pearn’s list of mainstream medicinal plants derived from Australia rises to five, even if the most recent addition, like me, is a recent settler in the country.
Who knows what other beneficial products are pulsing through the vegetation of Australia? Well, our Aboriginal compatriots and mothers for starters.
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