Old wives tales, bush remedies and traditional healing plants are often the beginning of scientific research in addressing health problems. And so it is with finding an answer for skin cancer for Australians according to an article in Courier Mail QWeekend magazine 20-21 November 2010.

We have one of the highest rates of skin cancer in the world with 1,850 deaths each year (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2010). Predictions are that at least two in three Australians will develop skin cancer by age 70. So it is fitting that an Australian biochemist, Dr Jim Aylward, who received his PhD in 1975 at Monash University, should be the one to come up with a solution.

During Christmas holidays in 1980 Dr Jim Aylward was shown a newspaper article by his mother, about a weed that had long been used as a bush remedy for sunspots. The story quoted a Medical Journal of Australia article about a farmer who had been diagnosed with basal cell carcinoma on his chest that disappeared when the farmer self treated his cancer, using sap from a plant known as radium weed.

Scientific research is a lengthy and expensive business, but Jim Alyward’s curiosity was tweaked. He wondered how the weed had worked, and how active it might be against other cancers. In 1981 he planted some radium weed, a common weed across Australia and New Zealand, on his father’s Sunshine Coast property. And so his pet project began, on the side, while working for CSIRO in Brisbane.

In 1997 he finally took some diluted sap to professor Peter Parsons at the Qld Institute of Medical Research who was to test this on human melanoma cells. Weeks later Jim was excitedly told it was turning melanoma cells back to the appearance of normal cells. He was ecstatic.

Aylward continued to work on the milky sap to isolate the ingredient in the weed called ingenol mebutate, which he found was “active against every sort of cancer tested, not just melanoma.” Using his own money and with backing from small investors, he came close to broke several times over the years. But he was persistent, and eventually lucky. In September 2009, LEO Pharma, a Danish multinational company, bought the process for US$287.5 million. The work he had begun in 1981 had finally paid off.

The cream Dr Jim Aylward developed from radium weed sap is likely to be on the Australian market by 2012. Just one application per day for two days he says, will make a sunspot disappear though he warns against self-treating at this stage.

“Radium weed will help conquer skin cancer,” he says, and there’s no telling what other cures are contained in the plants all around us.

Don’t you love it when “old wives” and “bush remedies” and “traditional cures” are vindicated?
Cheers
Anna McRobert