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Asked by V to Alex, Laura, Lesley, Richard, vediacan on 23 Jun 2015.
Question: In your work/research, have you considered 'natural remedies/medicine' (e.g. manuka honey to treat cancer)?
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Richard Prince answered on 23 Jun 2015:
Hi V.
Glad you took up my suggestion of using the ask button. There are quite a lot of natural toxins that are useful to the receptor biologist and some of them have been useful as medicines. Here are a couple of examples:
Hyoscine is a toxin from a range of plants including deadly nightshade. It acts on a receptor called the muscarinic acetylcholine receptor and blocks it. This can be used medically in lots of ways. It can help with travel sickness (it’s the active ingredient of Kwells) and can be used to stop excess salivation cause by certain other medicines.
Another example is galantamine. It is found in snow drops and daffodils. It stops the breakdown of a signalling molecule called acetylcholine and allows it to act on its receptors for longer. It can be used to treat Alzheimer’s Disease.
Hope this helps
best wishes
Richard
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Vedia Can answered on 23 Jun 2015:
Hi V!!
Fantastic question! I have actually taken manuka honey to support my immune system during a nasty stomach bug and it helped! As a Pharmacologist I am suppose to be against the use of natural remedies/ medicine in research. However, I find this field interesting, and I could potentially consider trying out natural remedies (in particular anti-inflammatory remedies) on cartilage in the near future.
It is important to stress that Cancer is a serious disease and manuka honey cannot treat it (i am aware you have used this as a simple example but I thought it would be best to address that issue). There are limitations to every natural remedy; they can only be used to relieve mild symptoms. Synthetically produced drugs are very potent and effective (and they have surpassed numerous clinical trials, and proven their efficacy) unlike the natural remedies.
Best Wishes,
Vedia
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Laura Newton answered on 25 Jun 2015:
Hey V!
Honey is really amazing, it’s already used to treat flesh wounds and there’s evidence that it can help soothe your throat if you have a cough though the active ingredient hasn’t even been identified! There is increasing scientific evidence that chamomile tea actually does help boost your immune system. There are an increasing numbers of scientists investigating other natural remedies too. But a lot still needs to be found out, like how many cups of tea do you have to drink over how long to get some benefit.
There are also a lot of drugs that have been identified in plants and extracted and now are made synthetically so we can make them in greater amounts and more efficiently. Paclitaxel for example is one of the most widely used and important cancer drugs, used for a wide range of cancers. It come from the bark of yew trees and targets tubulin which stops cells dividing. There are still lots of people working on discovering drugs from natural products.
In terms of using natural products for my research there are some problems. If there was something that already had kind of a ‘legend’ around it (like carrots helping you see in the dark) then it would be easy to test, which there isn’t for my area. Or I would have to screen who knows how many different natural products on the off chance that something might work. This is how most natural product drugs are found but it’s done by big companies with lots of equipment and man power. Another problem is that if you want to test a whole product, such as carrots rather than just one molecule, then really you want to be able to test it straight on humans as most natural products need to be ingested which would be very difficult for me to get approval for.
So instead I’m taking a more targeted approach. My research uses peptides (which are natural molecules, I just make them synthetically) so I can test them on cells and make sure they work in exactly the way I think they are working. Hopefully this design strategy will make it easier than randomly testing different things.
Sorry this answer got a bit long!
Best wishes,
Laura 🙂
Comments
Richard commented on :
Hi V
Vedia has raised an important point here: people talk about “complementary and alternative medicines and therapies” and there is an important difference between those too things. For some minor illnesses, alternative therapies can work. Sometimes (especially in the case of herbal remedies), this is because of an active ingredient in the medication. Other times, it is because the person taking the alternative remedy really believes it is going to work. This can have powerful effects on the body (the brain interacts even with the immune system) and produce benefits. You have probably heard of this – it is called the placebo effect. The placebo effect can occur with “proper” medicines too.
For more serious illnesses like cancer, the placebo effect is rarely strong enough to produce a cure, so it is important to take medicines that have good evidence that they work. This is where the danger with alternative therapies lies….. they are not really alternatives in many cases! Read up on what happened to Steve Jobs.
Complementary therapies are where you take the herbal remedy or say, acupuncture, alongside conventional medication. In many cases this is a much better approach: if the complementary therapy acts entirely through a placebo effect, then there is no danger to the patient and they will get the “best of both worlds”. However, some herbal remedies contain quite powerful drugs and can be dangerous alongside conventional medication. An example is St John’s Wort, a plant used to treat depression. On its own, it works quite well as an antidepressant (this has been proven in many clinical trials) – it contains a chemical called hyperforin that works in a similar way to Prozac. However, if you take it in addition to a drug like Prozac it causes problems: you get a massive increase in a signalling molecule called serotonin – that can lead to increases in blood pressure or even send you psychotic. That’s not the only problem! St John’s Wort alters the metabolism of other drugs and can stop them working. It does this to the contraceptive pill and so unwanted pregnancies can result.
If you want to take complementary medicines then you are probably best doing so with the support of your doctor. They’ll be able to tell you about possible bad interactions with the conventional medications that you’ve been prescribed.
All the best
Richard
Richard commented on :
@Vedia. Aren’t the peptides you are working on “natural remedies”?! The melanocyte simulating hormones are natural products of the human body….. herbal medicine simply uses the natural products of other organisms.
The only difference between a herbal remedy and its “scientific” counterpart in many cases is that the scientific compound has been made synthetically and is standardised. In some cases, the active ingredient in the herbal remedy can’t be synthesised easily, and so the natural source is still used. For example, the Himalayan yew tree has been used by native peoples as a herbal remedy for thousands of years. We now use the active ingredient, taxol, as a breast cancer treatment. We still get taxol from yew trees! Standardisation makes an important difference but it’s also important to acknowledge that conventional medicine is great at stealing the ideas of thousands of years of herbal therapy and then calling it science!
Richard commented on :
Sorry, stimulating …. can’t edit comments