Key Agent in Anti-Cancer Drug Found in Hazelnuts

Researchers say that they have found the active ingredient of the cancer-fighting drug Taxol in hazelnuts, a discovery that could lead to alternatives to current production methods.

“This is potentially good news for cancer patients,” said Angela M. Hoffman, a member of the research team at the University of Portland in Oregon, who presented the study Wednesday at the national meeting of the American Chemical Society.

But one thing is clear: Eating hazelnuts has no cancer prevention or cancer-fighting benefits. “Won’t do any good at all, because Taxol is not active orally,” said Robert Holton, a Florida State University chemist who developed the method used to synthesize the drug. Holton receives royalties from Bristol-Myers Squibb, which manufactures Taxol.

In May, Bristol-Myers will go to trial in New Jersey to defend its patent against nine pharmaceutical companies seeking to market generic versions of Taxol. The company did not return calls requesting comment.

Worldwide sales of Taxol brought the company $1.48 billion last year, 7.3% of its total sales. The drug is now made using chemicals from needles of the yew tree.

Taxol is approved in the United States for treating ovarian cancer, breast cancer, non-small-cell lung cancer and an AIDS-related cancer known as Kaposi’s sarcoma.

It remains unclear whether it would be economical or even possible to extract paclitaxel--the active drug in Taxol--from hazelnuts in commercially useful amounts.

Gram for gram, hazelnuts carry one-tenth as much of the chemical as yew trees, the research found.

“I’m not sure I see what the advantage of the hazelnut over the yew tree would be,” said oncologist Clifford Hudis, chief of the Breast Cancer Medicine Service at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

Taxol and the yew needles used to make it are not in short supply. When the Food and Drug Administration first approved the drug late in 1992, it was the source of considerable controversy because Pacific yew trees were being cut down to make it.

But Bristol-Myers quickly found a synthetic production method that starts with the needles of European and Asian yews. No trees die and the needles are plentiful.

The Oregon researchers’ work began as an effort to determine why certain hazelnut trees resist a plant disease known as eastern filbert blight. When a chemical analysis of the trees was conducted, paclitaxel turned up in the tree’s nuts, branches and shells.