Plant-Derived Drug Puts Cancer Into Remission

An herbal compound, combined with a conventional chemotherapy drug, put 20 Chinese patients with hard-to-treat cancer into remission. While the promising results warrant further investigation, a new study shows that herbal remedies may be surprisingly effective in treating cancer.

The herbal treatment is called homoharringtonine (HHT). Though HHT was first isolated in the 1970s, the plant from which HHT is derived, an evergreen tree called the Chinese plum yew, has long been used in Chinese herbal remedies to eliminate parasites. In 2012, the FDA approved HHT to treat a slow-progressing form of leukemia called chronic myelogenous leukemia for which other treatments haven’t worked.