Омела белая Viscum album Mistletoe

Abstract

1. Introduction

There is a variety of mistletoe extracts available, differing in mistletoe host trees and extraction methods as well as further pharmaceutical processing [10]. Mistletoe extracts used in anthroposophic medicine (Iscador, Helixor, abnobaVISCUM, Iscucin, and Isorel) rely on specific anthroposophic pharmaceutical procedures that were developed on the basis of suggestions of Steiner to enhance anticancer efficacy of mistletoe [11]. In general, extracts from mistletoe harvested in different seasons (summer and winter) are mixed together in a sophisticated, specifically designed apparatus.

From a pharmaceutical point of view, the question arises whether the anthroposophic pharmaceutical procedures applied indeed enhance anticancer efficacy as intended. This in turn leads to the following question: which methods are suited and applicable to study any such increase in remedy efficacy? In general, mechanism studies performed on the cellular level are considered to be the scientifically and ethically appropriate first step prior proceeding to animal or human experimentation.

Correspondingly, determination of the toxicity of differently processed mistletoe extracts in cancer cell lines can be seen as first step to study the pharmaceutical process in question. This approach is based on the basic assumption that cancer is a cell-based disease, caused by multiple mutations of normal cells resulting in malignant cells, eventually supported by nonmalignant cells in the environment [12, 13].

A complementary view of cancer is that this disease is primarily a phenomenon at the level of multicellular organization. According to this view, tumors form if the organism as a whole is too weak to control individual cell growth [14]. Lately, the tissue organization field theory (TOFT) was put forward to challenge the somatic mutation theory (SMT) of cancer [15]. Anthroposophic medicine also presumes tumors to be failures of morphostasis and that cancer is primarily a coordination problem of the different super- and subordinated organizational levels within an organism [16, 17]. Correspondingly, anthroposophic tumor therapy complements conventional antitumor therapy with special measures to reestablish superordinate control and regulation [18, 19].

Methods and tools of preclinical research in cancer depend on the basic underlying paradigm, that is, the basic concept and understanding of cancer, its causes, and its formation (e.g., SMT or TOFT). Approaches based on the somatic mutation theory firstly center on cell-based bioassays and consequently on cell-tissue interactions. Preclinical approaches in cancer research based on the morphogenetic paradigm are much less developed [14]. For principal reasons, these primarily center on cancer in nonhuman biological models as a disorder phenomenon of the general morphological structure of entire organisms and subsequently also tissue-cell interactions, preferably in three-dimensional in vitro models.

The aim of the present study was to compare two complementary preclinical approaches to investigate the effects of one particular anthroposophic pharmaceutical process designed to enhance mistletoe efficacy. In this process, extracts from European mistletoe harvested in summer and winter are mixed together in the edge of a high-speed rotating disk. First, possible alterations in cell-based toxicity were tested in a panel of five cancer cell lines. Second, we investigated the potential of a newly developed morphological bioassay in which correspondingly processed mistletoe extracts were examined regarding their potential to protect plants from the damaging, shape changing effects of colchicine (colchicine tumor formation in Lepidium sativum L.).