Fast facts (if you don’t have time to read the full post): Two days until I start 12 rounds of weekly chemo! I am surprisingly anxious. I had my first of three meetings tonight to learn more about my future breast reconstruction surgery. I won’t be covering that information tonight, but you bet we will have a post about it this week! This week is all about education. Also happy National Nurse’s Week! Gosh I love all of my nurses at the cancer center. They are wonderful gems!

TO THE LONG VERSION!

I start weekly chemotherapy on Thursday. Woo! But also weekly chemo just sounds shitty because that is a lot of chemo. I have twelve weeks left before I get my boobs chopped off. Well, I do get a break between chemo and surgery, but in terms of treatment left, that is not a lot. That is some dark shit. Chemo is a piece of cake compared to getting my nip nops removed. So let’s not think about that right now and talk about how Taxol chemo is kind of badass! I am about to blow your mind with some sCiEnCe.

Here is the thing: I about nearly failed chemistry in high school. I ended up with a D+ I think at the end of the trimester. Oops. That was the first time in my life that I had done really poorly in school. I was generally a straight-A student. I liked school, but also school never came easy for me. But nearly failing was not entirely my fault. I was on Acutane, was severely depressed (in retrospect), and sat next to a boy that I had a major crush on who didn’t like me and ended up being gay. I was just too busy being flirty and sad to care. The perfect high school combo! Chemistry also involves a lot of math and words I just didn’t care about. But I genuinely wonder if I would have liked chemistry if we were talking about chemotherapy or something because right now I am fascinated as fuck with what is going into my body. You will be, too!

Myth busted: chemotherapy isn’t all just synthetic man-made poison. I seriously thought it was, but really chemo has an interesting history and my upcoming drug is made from plants! Now, I want to let you all know that it has been seven years since I have written an academic paper and this platform is a blog, so I am going to be lazy and not write a seven page article on what I have learned. There are some awesome pages that I am going to reference in my “in a nut shell” history lesson on Taxol chemotherapy that give a more thorough history and I encourage you all to read those after to learn more because there is a TON of information. I won’t be including it all in this blog for brevity and also because I don’t feel like writing an academic paper, like I said.

TO THE (IN A NUT SHELL) HISTORY!

According to Cancer.gov, In 1962, on an excursion in Washington State, USDA botanist Arthur Barclay collected bark and other samples from the Pacific yew tree. Two years later, Monroe E. Wall, Ph.D., and Mansukh Wani, Ph.D., who were under contract to NCI at the Research Triangle Institute in North Carolina, discovered that extracts from the Pacific yew were toxic to living cells. Dr. Wall and his colleagues then isolated the most cytotoxic compound from the bark of the tree and called it paclitaxel.

Fast forward to 1977, paclitaxel was selected for clinical development after showing some promising antitumor activity in some mouse models. It was discovered that the compound is an antimitotic agent that blocks cancer cell growth by stopping cell division, resulting in cell death. Even more exciting was that paclitaxel worked to prevent cell division through a different mechanism compared with other antimitotic drugs available at the time.

Despite these findings, clinical trials were delayed because of how slowly Pacific Yew trees grow and how much bark is needed to produce therapeutic doses. It was also incredibly expensive to manufacture. So the race was on globally to develop a synthetic form of the compound.

In 1991, NCI partnered with the pharmaceutical company Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS) for the commercial production of Taxol, using a semisynthetic form of the compound. In 1992, Taxol was approved by the FDA for the treatment of ovarian cancer. Two years later, it was approved for use against breast cancer. The tiny “this is meant to beeeee” moment for me is that Taxol is thirty years old and I turn thirty this year. Not that I was meant to have cancer (although I guess I technically am because it is literally in my genes) but you get what I mean.

Today, Taxol is the most well-known natural-source cancer drug in the United States and is used in the treatment of breast, lung, and ovarian cancer, as well as Kaposi’s sarcoma. Clinical trials to test Taxol against other types of cancer and in combination with other therapies are currently in progress.

And that is my little “in a nut shell” debrief. Plants, man! Fuck yeah science! It is incredible to know that this significant cancer treatment is fairly young. It gives a lot of hope for future treatments of breast cancer and other cancers. Imagine all of the other highly active natural products from plants, marine, and fungal sources that are waiting to be discovered and will benefit so many cancer patients and even other chronic illnesses! Shout out to this amazing planet!

Want to read up and learn more? Of course you do because science is wild and fascinating as fuck. Dive right in, cookie:

Source one – Cancer.gov

Source two – Acs.org

Source three – dtp.cancer.gov

Source four: Chemocare.com

Today’s song lyric of the day is brought to you by Flux Pavilion.

“I still wanna be a spaceman
Show the people that we can
Make our magic inescapable
Rewrite the master-plan
When I say jump, I don’t think how high
I got the starlight in my eyes
It’s where the notion is a resource
And we got enough starting up
Count down to the scientist”

– The Scientist, Flux Pavillion