Johns Hopkins study highlights promise of IV mistletoe extract for cancer therapy

BALTIMORE — Ivelisse Page already had 15 inches of her colon and 28 lymph nodes removed to treat her colon cancer, but in the winter of 2008 she received more devastating news.

The cancer had spread to her liver.

Page’s doctor, Dr. Luis Diaz – an oncologist at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York and professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine — gave her an 8% chance of living for more than two years.

Since chemotherapy and radiation wouldn’t increase her chances of survival, Page decided not to undergo either of the intensive treatments. Instead, she and her husband considered another treatment suggested by an integrative practitioner at Baltimore’s Ruscombe Mansion Community Health Center: mistletoe therapy.

Though European mistletoe extract isn’t approved as a cancer treatment by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, it’s one of the most commonly prescribed therapies used to treat cancer in Europe and has been used for centuries to treat ailments such as headaches, hypertension, epilepsy and asthma, according to the National Cancer Institute.

But Page didn’t know that. When the practitioner, Dr. Peter Hinderberger, brought up extract from the poisonous, semiparasitic plant as a possible treatment, she was confused.

“Wait, isn’t that the plant you see at Christmastime?” she remembered asking him.

Still, she figured she had “everything to gain and nothing to lose.” So that day in Hinderberger’s office, Page received her first injection of mistletoe extract — a decision she believes is a big reason she remained cancer-free for more than a decade after getting surgery to remove 20% of her liver.

Page’s experience with the plant’s extract, which she still injects under her skin twice per week, inspired researchers at the Johns Hopkins Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center to launch what they believe was the first phase 1 clinical trial conducted in the U.S. on intravenous Helixor M, a brand of European mistletoe extract that is commercially available.

The team published the study’s findings online last month in the peer-reviewed, open-access journal Cancer Research Communications. Though the purpose of a phase 1 clinical trial is to evaluate the product’s safety and determine dosing for future research, participants in the Hopkins study also reported some disease control and improvement in their quality of life.

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