Foxgloves can fight cancer

Substances from foxgloves and -oleander cause cancer cells in -laboratory bowls to commit suicide.

By Lisa Olstad

Extracts from the Nerium Oleander plant were already being used to treat cancer in the Middle Ages, and in very different parts of the world. In Norway, extracts from different types of digitalis – foxglove – have been used to treat heart failure and irregularities in cardiac rhythm for at least 200 years. Recent research shows that different cancer-cell cultures commit programmed suicide when exposed to digitalis.

Oleander and foxglove contain substances which we call cardiac glycocides, which consist of one steroid nucleus, one unsaturated lactone and one carbohydrate. The foxglove provides the cardiac glycocides digitoxin and dixogin, while oleander gives us oleandrin. Chinese herbal medicines, which have a history of being used to treat cancer, often contain cardiac glycocides. In the West, ever since the 1960s researchers have known that cardiac glycocides can check the growth of cancer cells, but animal research suggested that it was necessary to use such large doses that the glycocides became toxic. This reduced any interest in further research. However in 1979, Swedish researchers noticed that women who had been operated for breast cancer and had heart complaints that were being treated with digitalis had cancer cells that were less malignant than in patients who were not using digitalis. The percentage of relapses was also drastically lower. Even so, this discovery did not lead to further research at that time.

Now Norwegian scientists are picking up the abandoned research. Three years ago Johan Haux, a research scholar in the Department of Cancer Research and Molecular Biology at NTNU, began to study the effects of digitalis on different types of cells, such as cancer-cell cultures from the brain, blood, breast and prostate. Research showed that a supply of digitoxin or digoxin in concentrations that are not toxic to humans led to a programmed death of cells in all these cancer-cell cultures.
– The problem with cancer cells is not only that the cells divide far too fast, but that they don’t die, says Haux. – Accordingly, one way to attack this condition is to isolate the mechanisms that govern this process, so that we can stimulate the cancer cells to commit suicide in the way that normal cells do. The tests that we have conducted with digitalis seem promising in this respect.
The Trondheim researchers have also discovered that digitoxin increases the effects of radiation on breast-cancer and brain-cancer cells. They are now planning clinical research on patients with a specific type of brain tumour called glioblastoma. Other types of cancer which laboratory tests have shown to be susceptible to treatment, such as prostate cancer and certain types of lymphatic cancer, will also be considered.

Contact: Johan Haux
Tel: +47 73 86 78 30
Email: jhaux@operamail.com