Of enzymes, worms and cancer

Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients,  Nov, 2004  by Ralph W. Moss

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That unloved little girl of the children's rhyme, who sat in the garden eating worms, may have been onto something. There is a new health product on the market called lumbrokinase, which is derived from the common earthworm, Lumbricus rubellus. Along with ants, insects and other creepy-crawly things, earthworms have for thousands of years been a staple of Traditional Chinese Medicine (Mihara 1992). One ancient Chinese medical text, the Ben Cao Gang Mu (or Compendium of Medicine) states that earthworms (known as "Di Lung") are useful in unblocking the body's acupuncture meridians and channels, improving circulation and overcoming numbness in the limbs.

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In a beautifully written 1883 book, The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms, no less a luminary than Sir Charles Darwin observed the ability of worms to digest just about everything in their path. He compared the juices of the earthworm's digestive tract to the pancreatic secretions in humans: "The digestive fluid of worms is of the same nature as the pancreatic secretion of the higher animals," wrote the great English biologist, "and this conclusion agrees perfectly with the kinds of food which worms consume. Pancreatic juice emulsifies fat, and we have just seen how greedily worms devour fat; it dissolves fibrin, and worms eat raw meat; it converts starch into grape-sugar with wonderful rapidity, and we shall presently show that the digestive fluid of worms acts on starch."

It was in fact the ability of the worm's digestive juices to dissolve fibrin that attracted the attention of scientists a century later. During the 1970s, Prof. Shan Hongren discovered the enzymatic functions of an extract of earthworms. For this he was honored with the United Nations Science Conference Award in 1978. In 1997, a product made from earthworms, named Plasmin, was approved by the Chinese government as a new medicine. In 1999, the China Medical Society made Plasmin a key product to be promoted all over China. In the same year it was registered by the China Supervisory and Administrative Bureau as a class 2 nationally protected TCM formula, and in 2000 it was included in the Chinese National Pharmacopoeia--at least according to a number of promotional websites (Health King 2004).

Starting in the 1980s, Japanese scientists confirmed this observation experimentally when they isolated six proteolytic enzymes from earthworms. They collectively named these enzymes lumbrokinase (LK). Lumbrokinase is now being made available by a number of American food supplement distributors, including Allergy Research Group of California.

There are presently 17 articles on lumbrokinase in the National Library of Medicine's encyclopedic database, PubMed. This is not a great number, and only one of these articles is a clinical study. However, this study concluded that "lumbrokinase is beneficial to the treatment of cerebral infarction" (Jin 2000). The substance also shows some potential in the postoperative care of patients who have received prosthetic vascular grafts (Hwang 2002).

I learned about lumbrokinase from a prostate cancer patient, whose naturopath suggested it as an alternative treatment. There are currently no articles in PubMed on the use of lumbrokinase in cancer treatment. I therefore would not support the use of lumbrokinase for this purpose until the necessary clinical research has been done. But the basic concept is sound, and such research is certainly warranted.

Role of Pancreatic Enzymes

There is considerable evidence to suggest that taking digestive enzymes may be an important part of an overall anticancer program. This is the approach taken by Nicholas J. Gonzalez, MD, of New York City, whose pancreatic enzyme-based anticancer regimen is currently being studied by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). The actual clinical trial of his regimen languishes for want of support by the oncology community (Chowka 2002). But there was encouraging news this May from the University of Nebraska. An animal study co-authored by Dr. Gonzalez and published in the peer-reviewed journal Pancreas showed that the orally administered enzymes developed by Dr. Gonzalez and his colleagues had profound health-promoting and anticancer effects.

In this study, pancreatic cancer was first grafted into nude mice, rodents whose lack of a functioning immune system allows them to serve as living laboratories for the study of cancer. The mice were then treated with porcine pancreatic enzyme extracts (PPE) that were included in their drinking water. A control group received no enzyme supplements.

Treated mice "survived significantly longer than the control group," according to Murat Saruc, MD, and colleagues at the Eppley Institute for Research in Cancer and Allied Diseases in Omaha. Additionally, tumors in the PPE-treated group "were significantly smaller than in the control group." All mice in the control group showed abnormalities of metabolism in the early stages of tumor growth, "whereas only a few in the treated group showed some of these abnormalities at the final stage." The authors concluded that treatment with pancreatic enzymes "significantly prolongs the survival of mice ... and slows the tumor growth" (Saruc, 2004).