May Cordyceps Mushrooms cure pancreatic cancer?

Himalayan fungus Cordyceps sinensis has been used in traditional Chinese medicine for hundreds of years to prevent and treat cancers and other inflammatory diseases. However, the latest studies found the reason of the limited applicability and limited effectiveness of the Cordyceps Therapy to the Pancreatic Patients. The problem is that Cordyceps breaks down quickly in the blood stream, so a minimal amount of cancer-destroying components is actually delivered to the affected cells.

What is Cordyceps?

Cordyceps is a genus of mushrooms that counts over 600 species. These adaptogenic mushrooms are prominently featured in ancient Chinese herbal medicine. Although they've been used in eastern integrative medicine for centuries, the western world is just now starting to appreciate these medicinal mushrooms.

The most popular and well-researched cordyceps varieties are Cordyceps sinensis and Cordyceps militaris. Although human research is still scarce, these parasitic mushrooms show great promise as a research topic in various animal and human cell studies.

Bioactive Components of Cordyceps Mushrooms

Cordyceps is packed with nutrients and bioactive compounds, some of which are only beginning to be understood by science:

· cordycepin (3'-deoxyadenosine)

· ergosterol peroxide

· adenosine

· fibrinolytic enzyme

· xanthophylls

· polysaccharides

· nucleosides

· cytosine

· uracil

· thymine

· adenine

· guanine

· hypoxanthine

· sterols

· peptides, including cordymin

· tryptophan

Can Cordyceps Help with Cancer?

Cordyceps mushrooms are some of the healthiest mushrooms one can add to their diet. They have well-documented health benefits, including anti-inflammatory activities, immunity-boosting effects, and anti-cancer properties. While you should not use it on its own as a cure for cancer, adding cordyceps to your diet can help you face cancer head-on.

Cordycepin, a naturally-occurring nucleoside found in the cordyceps fungus has been used for centuries in traditional Chinese medicine to treat cancer, as well as chronic and inflammatory diseases.

The recent scientific rediscovery of natural medicines has led to a boom in cordyceps cancer research. Even the University of Oxford teamed up with a biopharmaceutical company in hopes of creating a cordyceps-based chemotherapy drug using ProTide technology.

Cordycepin Research

According to clinical studies, cordyceps may have anti-cancer and anti-metastatic properties. The mushroom can also help your body recover from the stress of chemotherapy and cancer medication.

In order to improve its potency and clinically assess its applications as a cancer drug, biopharmaceutical company NuCana has developed Cordycepin into a clinical therapy, using their novel ProTide technology, to create a chemotherapy drug with dramatically improved efficacy.

Once inside the body, Cordycepin requires transport into cancer cells by a nucleoside transporter (hENT1), it must be converted to the active anti-cancer metabolite, known as 3’-dATP, by a phosphorylating enzyme (ADK), and it is rapidly broken down in the blood by an enzyme called ADA. Together, these resistance mechanisms associated with transport, activation and breakdown result in insufficient delivery of anti-cancer metabolite to the tumor. NuCana have utilized novel ProTide technology to design a therapy that can bypass these resistance mechanisms and generate high levels of the active anti-cancer metabolite, 3’-dATP, inside cancer cells.

ProTide technology is a novel approach for delivering chemotherapy drugs into cancer cells. It works by attaching small chemical groups to nucleoside analogues like Cordycepin, which are then later metabolized once it has reached the patient’s cancer cells, releasing the activated drug. This technology has already been successfully used in the FDA approved antiviral drugs Remsidivir and Sofusbuvir to treat different viral infections such as Hepatitis C, Ebola and COVID-19.

The results of the study published in Clinical Cancer Research suggest that by overcoming key cancer resistance mechanisms, NUC-7738 has greater cytotoxic activity than Cordycepin against a range of cancer cells.

Oxford researchers and their collaborators in Edinburgh and Newcastle are now assessing NUC-7738 in the Phase 1 clinical trial NuTide:701, which tests the drug in patients with advanced solid tumors that were resistant to conventional treatment. Early results from the trial have shown that NUC-7738 is well tolerated by patients and shows encouraging signs of anti-cancer activity.