• Question: Do you think your work will help with cancer?

    Asked by berrylover22 to Jess on 21 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Jessica Chu

      Jessica Chu answered on 21 Jun 2011:

      Hi Berrylover22,

      Yes definitely. People have been using plants to treat all sorts of disease from over 4,000 years ago! Quite a few really successful drugs have been from natural products e.g. taxol and arteether. Over 60% of the anticancer drugs that are given to patients now are related to natural products! And over 50% of all drugs for different diseases are also related to natural products!
      I think if we look hard enough in the natural world – we can find a lot of useful things!

      My project is looking at some rainforest plants and one of my plants is giving me some really interesting and positive results!! So I am going to keep investigating it and hopefully it is something new 🙂

Comments