Word: tagliaferri
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...Bionovo, the drug discovery and development company in Emeryville, Calif., that's behind BZL101, there's hope too. The trial is the first FDA-validated clinical study of a potential cancer drug derived from a Chinese medicinal herb, says Dr. Mary Tagliaferri, a co-founder of the company, former practicing acupuncturist and a breast-cancer survivor. "Sixty-two percent of chemotherapy drugs come from natural products, and plants have been the basis of almost every new class of medication," she says. "It makes sense that these plants can act as anticancer agents...
...Tagliaferri's interest in Ban Zhi Lian, which has traditionally been used to treat swellings, sores and fever, was sparked in 1996 by a fellow acupuncturist, Isaac Cohen, who would later become a co-founder of Bionovo. At that time, Cohen had been treating, for a decade, women who were battling breast cancer with conventional medicines and had run out of treatment options. "In their exhaustion and desperation, they were trying to find an alternative treatment that was not so harsh," says Cohen, who often prescribed herbs to be prepared as teas to ease the side effects of chemo...
Cohen's early observations about Ban Zhi Lian may have started out as a hunch, but they may hold up. In 1996, Cohen and Tagliaferri, along with Dr. Debu Tripathy, then a breast cancer specialist at the University of California, San Francisco, co-founded the Complementary and Alternative Medicine program at the university's Carol Franc Buck Breast Care Center. Over the next several years, the trio amassed enough evidence about the herb's anticancer properties - in lab tests of animals and breast-cancer cells, BZL101 caused apoptosis or cell death, according to Tagliaferri - to get a green light from...
...Tagliaferri and Cohen left Buck to establish Bionovo, where they began Phase II trials of BZL101 in April 2006, expanding their studies to 10 hospitals and breast cancer centers, including the University of Chicago Medical Center, Duke University Medical Center and the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Bionovo expects the second phase of trials to conclude by early...
...funding either from the private sector or from pharmaceutical companies: "In the absence of controlled clinical trials, people are skeptical and say 'There's no evidence this works,'" he says. Bionovo, which expects to begin Phase III trials in 2009, hopes to upset this way of thinking. And, says Tagliaferri, the company is studying about two dozen other Chinese herbs with anticancer potential...