Plants: The birthplace of medicines
Before the nineteenth century, what we understood as medicine was mainly plant extracts, infusions and tinctures. So, during all the history of humankind, studying, classifying and understanding the effects of plants on our bodies has been among the most important activities. Pharmacopeias and encyclopedias on medicinal plants date back to ancient Egypt, with the Ebers Papyrus from 1550 BC. Books such as the Historia Plantarum by Theophrastus, Aristotle's successor, and De materia medica by Dioscorides represented the pinnacle of Greek, and consequently medieval, medicine with descriptions of numerous herbal drugs.
Cancer plant-based medicines
During the beginning of the nineteenth century, we were able to isolate the first active ingredients. The significance of plants became even more evident. Acetylsalicylic acid (aspirin), quinine and morphine are just some of the examples of drugs isolated from plants that were developed at the end of the 19th century. It took a little longer to find cancer drugs, as we only started seeing some form of drug therapy after the Second World War. But in the 1960s, the development of cancer drugs experienced a renaissance of discoveries with plant-based medicines.
A tree that saved millions of lives of people with cancer
A perfect example begins with the history of the European yew. The tree is well known throughout history. The Celts and Greeks named it the “tree of death”. Julius Caesar, in his book on the Gallic War, described a situation in which the king of a Celtic tribe, unwilling to fight in a war, used the extract of this tree to commit suicide. Over the course of history, we understood that there was something very poisonous in its bark and leaves.
But there is nothing more attractive to oncologists than a well dosed poison with the potential of killing cancer cells. So, the European yew was rediscovered in the early 1960s through a partnership between the National Cancer Institute and the US Department of Agriculture. In an era where pharmaceutical innovation was no different from the Ford’s factory model, the program coordinated by Dr. Jonathan Hartwell, established a systematic screening and isolation system that included more than 100,000 specimens.
From a tree to a best-selling cancer drug
Active ingredients called “Taxanes” were isolated from the bark of the European yew. After several chemical processes, this ingredient was going to become the best-selling cancer drug in history. 0.5 g of paclitaxel, also commercially known as Taxol, was extracted from 12 kg of dried yew trunk and bark, which corresponds to a yield of 0.004%. More than 2000 trees had to be felled to obtain 1 kg of paclitaxel. It took more than 20 years between improvements in the synthesis process and clinical trials to get to a commercially viable product. It was not until 1992 that the American company Bristol Myers Squibb submitted an application to the FDA, which was approved in 1994. To this day, paclitaxel and its derivatives such as dotaxel are still the first line treatment of various types of cancer such as ovarian cancer and non-small cell lung cancer.
The tree described by Julius Caesar as poisonous and dangerous became one of the most important medicines in modern cancer treatment. The history of paclitaxel is not only the history of a revolutionary drug that has saved the lives of millions of cancer patients over the past decades, but also a great reminder of how important plants are in drug discovery. Keep an eye on your backyard, the next pharmaceutical blockbuster might be waiting there to be discovered.
Written By Luis Guilherme
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