China, U.S. Seek to Protect Cancer-Fighting Tree

Yahoo - Reuters ^ | September 30, 2004 | Timothy Gardner

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NEW YORK (Reuters) - The United States and China want to expand trade regulations to protect Asian yew trees, a plant that provides the compound for one of the world's top-selling chemotherapy drugs but is threatened by poaching.

Chinese herbalists have used trees of the taxus species, also known as yew trees, for centuries to treat common ailments.

In the late 1960s, scientists in North Carolina found that extract of yew bark fought tumors, and in the early 1990s, the U.S. government approved the use of paclitaxel, also known as taxol, by drug company Bristol-Myers Squibb for chemotherapy.

Taxol, whose patent expired in the United States in 2001, is one of the best-selling drugs for treating lung, ovarian and breast cancers. In 2003, drug companies sold more than $4billion of products with taxol and other drugs derived from yew-trees known as taxanes.

Yews grow in Asia, Europe and North America, but in some regions of China they have been ravaged by peasants who illegally fell them to sell the bark ...

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Bump.

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Just for shakes, here is what one looks like.

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famous as the base of the F.U. salutation and the middle finger greeting from BATTLE OF ARISCOURT 1415