Thursday, October 6, 2011

Mushroom Medicine Offers Prostate Cancer Hope


A Queensland scientist says an edible mushroom used in Asia for its medicinal benefits may offer hope to men with prostate cancer.
Researcher Dr Patrick Ling from the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) says a chemical known as PSP can be extracted from the 'turkey tail' mushroom and inhibits the growth of prostate cancer cells in mice.
Dr Ling says the compound could also help improve the effectiveness of current treatments.
"The major problem of those treatments is you always have soft residual tumours left over, which are resistant to the therapies," he said.
"If you can actually target those residual tumours, which now is the cancer stem cell, then you may actually improve the overall survival of the patients."
Dr Ling says even he was surprised with the finding.
"The prevention part is what we are really excited by because we never saw something with 100 per cent inhibitions," he said.
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