Using Poison to Treat Cancer
By Ross Grant, HealthScoutNews Reporter
Doctors test arsenic to combat one form of leukemia
HealthScoutNews — As Josephine Comeau tells it, she came back from the dead.
After two chemotherapy treatments, a bone marrow transplant and a medicine cabinet full of prescriptions, the 53-year-old Brooklyn, N.Y., teacher’s aide found only limited success in overcoming her leukemia. Each treatment appeared to work, but soon the cancer would return.
“I was wiped out,” she says. “When I went home, I was in a wheelchair. I could barely walk. I had no hair, and my skin was like paper. But I began to get better and I thought I was home free. Then it came back.”
In 2001, Comeau’s doctors at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City made a frightening suggestion: Perhaps she should take arsenic to combat her disease, acute promyelocytic leukemia, or APL.
It worked.
Most Americans may associate arsenic with rat poison, but in China it’s a folk remedy. Doctors there have been using the naturally occurring element since the 1980s to treat acute promyelocytic leukemia. Sloan-Kettering researchers began testing it in the late 1990s.
The thought of taking arsenic, however, devastated Comeau.
“I went crazy when they told me,” she says. “It’s poison. They had to call a psychiatrist. I couldn’t stop crying, I was so scared.”
Comeau learned she had APL in 1998. She was on vacation when she stubbed her toe. It turned black and blue. The next day, other parts of her body were dark-colored, due to massive internal bleeding. In the hospital, doctors told her she had APL.
The cancer works in the blood by shutting down the production of red blood cells and healthy, infection-fighting white blood cells, allowing immature white blood cells to take over. Since the cancerous cells don’t die naturally, they flood the body, often leading to internal bleeding, explains Dr. Peter Maslak, chief of the hematology laboratory at Sloan-Kettering.
One advantage doctors have over leukemia compared to others cancers is that, because it exists in the blood, it has been historically easier to detect and study. As a result, it’s at the forefront of many advances in cancer research, Maslak says.
At first, arsenic scared American doctors. “The drug has a bad track record, to put it simply,” Maslak says. But researchers found that in the right dose, arsenic can kill off the immature white blood cells, leading to remission of APL.
And unlike chemotherapy or bone-marrow transplants, which can devastate a body as they fight the cancer, arsenic has limited side effects. But it isn’t good as a first treatment, Maslak says, because the patient’s liver can’t respond until after it has been treated with other therapies. So doctors combine arsenic with other drugs and lower doses of chemotherapy.
“We’re trying to cut down the number of toxic therapies that a person will have to endure to get well,” Maslak says.
Comeau’s leukemia went into remission after she began the arsenic treatment, which she continues. Within six months, she returned to her elementary school job.
“I felt like I walked in from the dead. I looked like I was 100 years old, but I enjoyed seeing the kids again,” she says.
“You’re not the same after all that,” Comeau adds. “I’m tired all of the time. But at least I’m here. I’m grateful I’m here.”
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