[MPWG] RE: tamoxifen

[rrr at montana.com]

Taxus brevifolia is a skinny, slow-growing tree here in Montana and
throughout the Pacific Northwest. Among the hundreds of compounds in it,
is taxol, a diterpene. A friend of mine, Rus Willis, who now runs Bighorn
Botanicals, was the original guy the drug company hired to run a crew to
strip these old trees of their bark. Rus is a cowboy and packer (takes
hunters out in the Fall on horseback and muletrain to the mountains where
they camp out and hunt for elk). Rus thought he was doing a good thing,
killing trees so that women could be cured of breast cancer.

But then one day the company called him up and told him they didn’t need
the bark anymore because they had figured out how to make tamoxifen it
synthetically. Rus had a garage full of bark and dozens of harvesters he
still had to pay. They left him high and dry, as you would say. After
experiencing the callous real world he decided that he should protect the
yew and save it for future generations. See, every tree had been mapped by
GPS throughout the whole of the Pacific Northwest. Interesting though, the
map to these trees has gone ‘missing.’ Rus still collects yew, but not the
bark, the green tips. And, he only collects the tips from trees in a
particular area every few years, giving the tree a chance to regrow what
had been clipped before. He does this with permits from the National
Forest Service. He also has sought help from foresters and others who can
give him an idea of how much he can take from an area sustainably. He
collects not only yew (and sells the tincture of the tips), but also many
other medicinal plants of Northern Montana. His Mom helps him run the
business and she is the computer nerd of the family. Rus employs local
folks and trains them in collecting carefully and sustainably.

About this same time, another friend of mine, Andrea Stierle, was fresh
out of grad school and working in Gary Strobel’s lab at Montana State
University. She and her chemist husband, Don Stierle, drove up to Glacier
National Park and with permission, collected some bark samples from yew
trees. Back in the lab, they cultured the bark and found many fungal
organisms growing inside the bark. When they got these growing by
themselves in flasks and then looked at what compounds they made, low and
behold one of them made taxol! So, it was now possible to make taxol from
a fungi and not kill every tree in order to get it from the bark. Their
work has led to more discoveries about the drug potential for other
compounds the fungi makes.

There are many species of Taxus, and yes, the ones growing in front of
houses in suburbia are species of Taxus. They all produce taxol to some
extent. But it’s not necessary to use the plant material because companies
have now figured out how to make tamoxifen synthetically. Good news for
the yews, that had always been treated by the loggers as ‘trash’ trees
that had no value.

There’s lots of stories like this. If you want the Tamiflu-star anise
story, let me know.

Best Regards,
Robyn Klein, Adjunct Instructor, AHG Herbalist, MS Medical Botany
Department of Plant Sciences and Plant Pathology
Montana State University