Word: fumagillin
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...proposed treatment, a synthetic version of an uncommon fungus known as fumagillin, has already shown evidence of halting cancerous lumps before they can send fatal offshoots to nearby lymph nodes or other vital organs. Laboratory animals subjected to this drug suffered from no harmful side effects associated with most common cancer treatments such as radiation therapy...
...opens up a whole new frontier in cancer therapy," says Ingber, who co-authored a December paper in Nature which identified the fumagillin fungus as an anti-tumor agent...
Ingber, along with Folkman and their associates, sent the corrupted sample to Japan, where chemists grew the fungus in huge 10,000-liter vats in order to extract the potent compound. The Japanese found the active, capillary-suppressing agent to be the rare fungus fumagillin...
After working for years on finding such a drug, Ingber had uncovered a mother lode--but there was a catch. Fed to rats, large enough doses of fumagillin proved capable of suppressing tumors, but at the same time also caused severe weight loss...
...chemical fiddling was enough to clear up the difficulty. Ingber and his colleagues synthesized from scratch in the laboratory an artificial likeness of fumagillin with all the tumor-suppressing capability, but without the side effects. The drug is known chemically...