Thought useless, Canada yew can fight cancer.

• Author: Ross, Ian
• Position: SPECIAL REPORT: BIOTECHNOLOGY

Canada yew was once regarded as a useless weed. Highly toxic and previously useful only as a colourful Christmas tree ornament, moose and deer would only eat the low-growing evergreen shrub as a food of last resort.

Today, it's considered a key ingredient in developing cancer-fighting drugs and someday there may be plantations of the stuff growing as a cash crop across Northern Ontario.

An experimental plantation project of Canada yew in the Sault Ste. Marie and Algoma district is drawing serious attention from pharmaceutical companies who are showing a keen interest in forest-derived drugs.

Also known as ground hemlock, the plant contains paclitaxel, a compound used to make Taxol (TM), the best selling chemotherapy drug in the world.

Approved for use in fighting breast and ovarian cancer and certain types of lung cancer, it generates nearly $1 billion US in annual sales. The North may prove to be an appealing place to grow it commercially because the wild plant appears to thrive here.

Of all the kinds of yew growing around the world, Northern Ontario-grown yew has the highest concentrations of paclitaxel, plus other more diverse ingredients including 10-DAB and DHB.

"It's a logical choice for plantation research and perhaps establishing plantations down the road," says project lead Tom Noland, an Ontario Forest Research Institute (OFRI) scientist in Sault Ste. Marie.

Canada yew grows naturally throughout Northern Ontario and its range stretches from Newfoundland to the Manitoba border. The plant flourishes in humid and moist conditions, especially next to lakes and rivers or beneath hardwoods such as maple and yellow birch.

It is harvested in the wild, mostly by Aboriginal groups, but because of the growing demand from pharmaceutical companies and the large amount of biomass required, producers of Taxol (TM) want more sustainable, controlled methods.

That's what spurred Noland and the Canadian Forest Service (CFS) in New Brunswick to jump on board to study alternative methods such as plantations to provide the paclitaxel.

Their early research work has generated inquiries from bio-pharmaceutical companies already involved in taxane work along with requests from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the Food and Drug Administration, asking how much source material comes from wild yew and from cultivated sources.

Noland says the yew project may open the doors to a treasure trove of bio-forest drugs. "Many of the pharmaceutical chemicals we...