Most Americans think of mushrooms as ingredients in soup or intruders on a well-tended lawn. Stamets, however, cherishes a grander vision, one trumpeted in the subtitle of his 2005 book, Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World. Mushroom-producing fungi, he believes, can serve as game changers in fields as disparate as medicine, forestry, pesticides and pollution control. He has spent the past quarter-century preaching that gospel to anyone who will listen.
At the end of his TEDmed talk Paul Stammet shared that one day his mother came up to him and said her left breast was five times the size of the right one. Having never been to a doctor before she did not know what to do. After being told in hospital she may not have long to live, maybe three months to live, and the second worst account of breast cancer they have seen, and may need strong treatments, Paul went out on a wing and spoke to a doctor about his profession and showed him the literature, which the doctor allowed. After giving her some of the trametes versicolor over a year on top of the usual meds, she is now 100% cancer free a year later, the doctors said it was the quickest and most complete recovery they had ever witnesses.
It has been shown to have extremely potent anti cancer properties, but since it is not patentable the drug companies have never paid for the clinical trials it would need as a cancer treatment. The following scientific papers are all on the subject of its anti cancer properties:
Jiménez-Medina E, Berruguilla E, Romero I, et al. (2008), “The immunomodulator PSK induces in vitro cytotoxic activity in tumour cell lines via arrest of cell cycle and induction of apoptosis”, BMC Cancer 8: 78, doi:10.1186/1471-2407-8-78, PMC 2291471, PMID 18366723. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18366723
Yamasaki A, Shoda M, Iijima H, et al. (March 2009), “A protein-bound polysaccharide, PSK, enhances tumor suppression induced by docetaxel in a gastric cancer xenograft model”, Anticancer Res. 29 (3): 843–50, PMID 19414318. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19414318
a b Oba K, Teramukai S, Kobayashi M, Matsui T, Kodera Y, Sakamoto J (June 2007), “Efficacy of adjuvant immunochemotherapy with polysaccharide K for patients with curative resections of gastric cancer”, Cancer Immunol. Immunother. 56 (6): 905–11, doi:10.1007/s00262-006-0248-1, PMID 17106715.http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17106715
“Antimetastatic effects of PSK (Krestin), a protein-bound polysaccharide obtained from basidiomycetes: an overview”. Cancer Epidemiol. Biomarkers Prev. 4 (3): 275–81. 1995. PMID 7606203. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7606203
Fisher, M. Y. (May 2002). “Anticancer effects and mechanisms of polysaccharide-K (PSK): implications of cancer immunotherapy”. Anticancer research 22 (3): 1737–1754. ISSN 0250-7005. PMID 12168863. edit http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12168863
Sugimachi K, Maehara Y, Ogawa M, Kakegawa T, Tomita M (4 August 1997), “Dose intensity of uracil and tegafur in postoperative chemotherapy for patients with poorly differentiated gastric cancer”, Cancer Chemother Pharmacol 40 (3): 233–8, doi:10.1007/s002800050652, PMID 9219507http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9219507
Hsieh TC, Wu JM (January 2001), “Cell growth and gene modulatory activities of Yunzhi (Windsor Wunxi) from mushroom Trametes versicolor in androgen-dependent and androgen-insensitive human prostate cancer cells”, Int J Oncol 18 (1): 81–8, PMID 11115542 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11115542
Dong Y, Yang MM, Kwan CY (1 January 1997), “In vitro inhibition of proliferation of HL-60 cells by tetrandrine and coriolus versicolor peptide derived from Chinese medicinal herbs”, Life Sci 60 (8): 135–40, doi:10.1016/S0024-3205(96)00695-9, PMID 9042394 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9042394
Yang MM, Chen Z, Kwok JS (1 January 1992), “The anti-tumor effect of a small polypeptide from Coriolus versicolor (SPCV)”, Am J Chin Med 20 (3-4): 221–32, doi:10.1142/S0192415X92000230, PMID 1471606 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1471606
Clark D, Adams M (2009), “A commercial nutraceutical mix Metabolic Cell-Support (MC-S) inhibits proliferation of cancer cell lines in vitro”, Austr. J. Med. Herbal. 21: 39–43
