Hope (and Money) May Grow on Trees : Taxol anti-cancer drug from forests underscores vital issues for Rio environmental summit

Three scientific marvels all tightly wrapped around a scientific warning made appearances last week at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in San Francisco.

The marvels involve a compound that can be derived from the bark of the Pacific yew, a tree that grows in the Pacific Northwest. The substance provides the most promising cancer drug of recent years, known in the United States as taxol.

The warning is for the United Nations’ Earth Summit meeting in Rio de Janeiro in June not to shrug off forests as incubators of medical wonders. Developing nations’ tropical forests, home to half of all animal and plant species on Earth, could prove to be especially valuable.

Scientists had believed that a major obstacle in making taxol from the Pacific yew was that up to six trees would need to be destroyed to treat a single patient; soon the source of the drug would have been wiped out. However, last Tuesday research teams in Florida and France disclosed that they had deciphered the compound that yields taxol. It turns out that it can be extracted from any part of either the Pacific or the European yew without killing the trees.

French researchers have used a compound called 10-deacetylbaccatin III to develop the drug Taxotere, which they say is even more potent in treatment of breast, ovarian and lung cancers and has fewer side effects.

And, finally, Stanford University researchers say they are close to producing a synthetic version of taxol that will not require taking any substance at all from the yews.

The Rio link is that world leaders will be asked to give poor nations a financial incentive to stop slashing and burning species-rich tropical forests in order to use the thin land under them for farming or grazing. By treaty the poor nations would get more control over their genetic resources, now under an informal and global “finders-keepers” rule.

An existing operation in Costa Rica shows how such a treaty would work. Costa Rica’s National Biodiversity Institute has begun an inventory of every species of plant and animal in the country. A U.S. drug company already has contracted to pay a royalty on sales of new pharmaceuticals that emerge from the samples that the institute collects. The World Resources Institute in Washington, D.C., says that a 2% royalty on just 20 new drugs would generate more income than Costa Rica now gets from exports of bananas and coffee.

Part of the taxol saga is that foresters once saw the Pacific yew as a “trash” tree, fit only for burning. That alone should make world leaders rush to give poor nations a reason to keep their trees alive.