Cancer breakthrough of the day

The Internets are full of a story about herbal tea curing breast cancer. The Herald is actually more restrained than many:

An extract commonly found in herbal tea can stop the spread of breast cancer, researchers have found.

That isn’t what the researchers found.  For a start, unless you’re in or near Pakistan, the extract isn’t commonly found in herbal tea.  But that’s not the main problem.

The paper (free, in PLoS One), has the much less alluring headline “An Aqueous Extract of Fagonia cretica Induces DNA Damage, Cell Cycle Arrest and Apoptosis in Breast Cancer Cells via FOXO3a and p53 Expression”.  The researchers took collections of  individual breast cancer cells and normal cells, soaked them in the plant extract, and measured what happened.   About 75% of the cancer cells died after three days, and less than 25% of the normal cells. The researchers also looked at how the cells died, to find out what cellular mechanisms were involved.

Obviously there are lots of things you could soak individual cancer cells in that would kill them, and a reasonable number that would kill more cancer cells than normal cells. In nearly all cases, just drinking the stuff wouldn’t get the right concentrations to the tumour, and would cause a lot of collateral damage.   At the moment, we don’t even have evidence in mice, let alone in people, that the tea has any effect on real breast cancer.

Medical Daily, which was the source for all the articles, was much worse.  They wrote

The plant has traditionally been used in parts of rural Pakistan to help people fight breast cancer. What had been dismissed as a folkloric remedy now seems to be true.

which seems completely indefensible.

The original university press release (although even it didn’t link to the actual research) was more restrained,

It has been traditionally used to treat women in rural Pakistan who have breast cancer, but up until now this treatment has been regarded as something of a folklore remedy. …

Now, scientists at Aston University in Birmingham and Russells Hall Hospital in Dudley have undertaken tests of the plant extract and proved that it kills cancer cells without damage to normal breast cells in laboratory conditions.

and included an independent comment

Dr Caitlin Palframan, policy manager at Breakthrough Breast Cancer said; “Some of the most important cancer-fighting drugs are originally derived from plants. As this research is at the very earliest stage we won’t know for quite some time whether drugs derived from this plant will be effective in treating breast cancer but we look forward to seeing any progress.”

One interesting aspect of this story is that the press release and Medical Daily used an unusual form of the common name of the plant  — “Virgon’s Mantlem”, which I haven’t been able to find anywhere except in references to this story. A useful marker to track the influence of the study in the future, perhaps.