Phytotherapy and Immune System Support for Prostate Cancer Patients

[This transcript is of a seminar that Dr. Ben Pfeifer gave at the Complementary & Natural Healthcare Expo at ExCel in London on October 23rd 2005. The audience was a mix of the general public, alternative and complementary healthcare practitioners, and medical doctors. Dr. Pfeifer kindly gave us permission to reproduce his copyrighted lecture materials.]

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Ladies and Gentleman, Dear Colleagues and maybe Dear Patients:

I do not know how many of you have friends and family members with cancer but I know one thing: it's getting more common. I remember very vividly when I was a young physician in 1973, I thought that after my long studies that I knew it all. I went to the largest clinic in German – a charity hospital in Humboldt University – and started treating patients… but I now realize how little I then knew. During the 31 years following I've learnt one thing: the more you dig in, the more you realize you do not know. That is a strange thought to start with, but it gives you food for thought when you go home. The physicians that you may see that sit in front of you when you go to a doctor's office are not on a different level, they have studied more, but they are on your level.

What I've tried to do today is tell you a bit about a system of therapy which we use for prostate cancer patients. Prostate cancer is now the number one cancer inflicting men. It used to be lung cancer but now it's prostate cancer. 30 years ago one in 30 Americans was diagnosed with cancer during their lifetime, but now it's one in three. And we expect this rise to continue. In 2010 the World Health Organisation expects this number to be 1 in 2 and for many people hearing that diagnosis there is very little help. For some of those with prostate cancer, particularly when it is far progressed and is not responding any more to the usual hormonal therapy, it is certainly true that there is little time left.

Let's now start with the actual talk. Here is a slide showing what we'd hate to have in our body: a dividing prostate cell.

We know that cancer cells have a feature which other cells in our body do not have. They are immortal - they do not die off as the other cells of our body do. Healthy cells have a pre-programmed time to live, and when the time is up, a mechanism sets in called apoptosis in normal cells - meaning normal cell death. For cancer cells this does not happen.

Every man fears a transurethral resection of the prostate. This is where the urologist goes into the penis into the inner side of the male body trying to take tissue out of the prostate to improve urination and prostate cancer is often discovered during this 1 procedure. And certainly every man wants to avoid a radical prostatectomy when surgeons have to remove the whole gland from the body. What can be done when prostate of the cancer is hormone refractory? That is the name which many of you may not know - meaning the normal treatment when this cancer is diagnosed is not working.

Normal treatment is taking down the male hormone- the testosterone level- because this cancer is very dependent on testosterone levels in the man's blood. By castrating the body by chemicals – usually injections, bringing down the testosterone levels and the cancer stops growing. This is a therapy that works in 99 -100% of patients but only for about 1-3 years. I have seen patients who have lived for 5 years but the next stage is called hormone refractory cancer where there is no treatment. In the past we used chemotherapy and I've done it very often in the last 20 years but it has very limited success. Patients do not like chemotherapy because it's not very effective and they know-they've seen other patients - that there are plenty of side-effects.

So this therapy is not very popular and we know now that it does not prolong life for patients with prostate cancer, it is not proven to work. There was a real need to have something else and about 10 years ago; I started looking into phytotherapeutics – compounds derived from plants that could be used for this hormone refractory stage of cancer. I was still at the University of Lexington in Kentucky, USA, when I started this and refined the protocol at the Aeskulap Cancer Centre. It's a combination of phyto-, immuno- and orthomolecular therapy. And I will let you know what I mean by this.

We started a prospective study to evaluate if this combination of phytonutrients, immunotherapy and orthomolecular supplementation can be used for hormone refractory cancer. The phytonutrient components we used are: ProstaSol, Curcumin Complex, Biobran and the orthomolecular combination product was Imupros.

We looked at the prostate specific antigen which is a marker which can easily be used to judge how the disease process is progressing. If we are having successes with our therapy, levels should be going down. If it's not successful it will be going up, so that is an easily accessible parameter from the blood of the patient. The CT scan is a computer thermography which can find metastatic lesions in the patient's body. A bone scan looking at the skeleton because cancer likes to go the bone and causes metastases. Last but not least, we also looked at the quality of life, as cancer makes tremendous difficulties for life. Often patients suffer from pain from lymph oedema due to blockages in the pelvis. They suffer other symptoms such as weight loss and anaemia. We had 180 patients in that study that all had to be at the hormone refractory stage and they all had metastases. We did a clinical follow-up during the 12 months looking at them at regular intervals.

ProstaSol, Curcumin Complex and Imupros were used and provided from a company in Holland and Biobran manufactured by Daiwa pharmaceutical in Japan was also provided for this study. The PSA, the normal blood count and blood chemistry were assessed every month and Quality of Life (QOL) every 2 months. Bone scan, CT scan, MRI scan were also carried out at beginning and at the end.

We know from Prostasol that it contains 9 herbs all with proven efficacy against BPH – benign prostatic hyperplasia (enlarged prostate) and also against prostate cancer as seen in the laboratory. If you place prostate cancer cells in a Petri dish in the lab you can add ProstaSol to it and you can see it massively inhibiting the growth of these cells. We know that ProstaSol can produce apoptosis – normal cell death, after it is taken up by the patient orally; not an injection or an infusion, so it is easier for the patient. The patient just has to take a capsule. We know that it inhibits pain, suppresses cancer cells and it also relieves pain.

And we know that it is even efficacious in this last stage of the disease where we do not have anything else to offer patients. I will now show you some of the plants compounds that go into ProstaSol. They all have anti-tumour and anti-inflammatory effects according to the pharmacological literature.

This is what we have found in the laboratory. We see that ProstaSol extracts inhibit cancer growth and this is true for hormone refractory prostate cancer in a Petri dish in the lab in a dose-dependent fashion. This means that the more ProstaSol extract we use the better the effect. We know that ProstaSol down-regulates a certain receptor at the prostate cancer cell thereby reducing PSA expression, and thereby reducing the undocking of testosterone at the prostate cancer cell. This is disturbed by ProstaSol. When we are using prostate in cells in lab, they are sensitised against heat and radiation. This means they become more sensitive to heat therapy but also to radiation treatment.

The second compound in our treatment protocol is curcumin. We use a substance that is made up from curcuminoids from turmeric root and also contains bioperin, a substance in black pepper that helps with re-absorption of curcuminoids through the intestinal mucosal lining. Then we added a strong anti-oxidative substance from grapes called resveratrol.

What is known about Curcumin complex and curcuminoids in general is that they will inhibit cancer from developing in the first place. There are cancer prone mice, for example, that spontaneously develop breast cancer, but if you feed them curcuminoids they do not develop breast cancer. It is known that once cancer has occurred, it can also suppress tumour growth. And that is also has anti-inflammatory effects, therefore it also reduces pain, as we know that some of our pain comes from pro-inflammatory substances. And it is anti-oxidative and also prevents the development of blood vessels from developing and spreading so readily, so it has an anti-angiogenesis effect. (It prevents metastases because when cancer grows it needs a blood supply from blood vessels, if that supply is disturbed it can not grow as easily. So you are basically starving the cells with anti-angiogenesis drugs.)

I will now mention the PSA- tissue specific marker which can be an indicator for prostate cancer. The study group using curcumin who had gone through hormonal therapy had a reduction in cancer growth and also their PSA, as did the group taking curcumin without hormonal therapy. Over 5 months it came down significantly using 3g of Curcumin complex a day.

This substance is used to stimulate the immune system and in particular a very important part of the immune system – this is BioBran…

The major part in Biobran is the molecule Arabinoxylan derived from rice bran hemicellulose by enzymatic extraction with the help of an enzyme from the shitake mushroom. It is an Arabinose and a Xylose molecule which is a branched sugar and that branched sugar has plenty of biological effects. One of the most striking effects is that it is very strong – maybe the strongest NK cell activator. NK cells are the immune cells that we need to fight cancer, without them there is no immune response or meaningful defence against cancer.

And this picture shows the Biobran is capable of destroying much more cancer cells that other arabinoxylans.

It can do it in a very efficient way…

When you give BioBran to a volunteer and you look at the NK cells activity over time of intake – here 2 weeks, you see that an intake of 2g for about 2 weeks causes an increase up to 60-70%. It you continue to take it, it remains high.

I have carried out the same experiment, which was done on volunteers, myself with 15 metastatic prostate cancer patients. You see an increase of NK activity by up to 250%. Of these 15 patients that were followed up, all had a nice increase of about 200% and only one didn't who died within 6 weeks of the study. That was a 2g a day dose for these patients and almost all showed this consistent increase.

Why is that important? Because there is a clear evidence that NK cell activity is impaired with ALL cancer patients.

Here you see the NK cell activity of a healthy patient – 100% activity, and if you look now at lung cancer, ovarian, breast prostate colon patients and you see more than 50% reduction of NK cell activity. So NK cell activity is very important for cancer patients, not only in the end stage but also at the very beginning to prevent cancer.

[Dr. Pfeifer's prevention protocol is between 500mg-1g of BioBran per day; often done in a cyclic fashion, e.g. 3 months on, 3-4 months off, and so on.]

The last compound in my protocol is the product: Imupros. This is a form of orthomolecular therapy meaning replenishing vital minerals, trace elements and other substances that may be lacking in prostate cancer. Here you see the contents and what the advantages of this are.

The first is that Imupros will provide all important nutritional factors for a healthy prostate; there is plentiful evidence in the pharmacological literature that all the nutrients in this product are important for maintaining prostate health. Now, the Dutch pharmacist behind it was able to bring these compounds into time-release small capsules, where only the active ingredients are included and so that the active substances within the capsules do not fight with each other and so that the amount of the tablets that patients have to take is kept to a minimum. Before this product, they were often asked to take 3O capsules a day only to get the vital nutritional substances into their system. We have reduced this to about 4 tablets and still have 800-100 mcg of selenium, 2g of vitamin C, vitamin D and vitamin E at very high dosages.

We start with the results as proof that this works. We have seen in the184 patients in the study that there was more than a 50% decline of PSA levels in more than 2/3rds of patients. This is a huge success for this treatment – not my success – as normally they do not respond to therapy any more. Chemotherapy does not prolong their life, it may possibly cause a PSA response of 30-40%. Here 2/3rds had a 60-70% decline. Their bone, Ct scans and MRI showed a significant improvement in tumour volume. Quality of 1 Life (QOL) improved in 2/3rds of patients. We have also seen a reduction in patients' pain rating.

These are the side effects: these were breast nipple soreness in 30-40%. We think this is due to phytoestrogenic effects from the phytosterols in ProstaSol but we do not know for sure. But we think so. We have seen dyspepsia in 5% usually just in the first week of therapy. As when they first start they have to take 3 x 3 capsules of ProstaSol, 2 x 2 tablets of Imupros, 2g of BioBran, 2 x 2-3 capsules of Curcumin Complex per day and taking this can cause dyspepsia with softer stool in some patients.

I'll show you the results of a couple of patients because usually this is the best way of getting an impression. This is the story of a 69 year old patient who came to the doctor with cough and bloody sputum in the beginning of 1999. At that time, his PSA was 45 (normal 3-4 for this age group.)

A chest x-ray showed multiple lesions- tumours in his lungs. Prostate biopsy confirmed the diagnosis and he started with androgen ablation therapy which is hormonal therapy. This was only effective for 12months and then we talk of therapy failure and his PSA increased to nearly 1000 by September of 2001. Now this patient was a physician himself and did not want chemotherapy and so he came to me in September 2001 and started on the protocol and here are his results:

PSA curve at beginning of 2000 came down to immeasurable levels over a year. Today his PSA level is below 0.1 and he is on a maintenance treatment of 1 capsule of ProstaSol, 500mg of BioBran and 1 tablet of Imupros. His cat scan on his lung before treatment in 2001 showed many lesions.

Now after 12 months the radiologist said he was not sure if any were left- the scan revealed slight marks which may just be scar tissue but they are massively reduced. Bone scan showed in the beginning many metastases in the lower and mid spine, pelvis and rib cage and a dangerous one which was osteoclastic- meaning that the bone density was reduced. If bone breaks here it can mean paralysis for this patient.

That was in September 2001, later in September 2002 scans showed there was nothing left. And radiologist said they were no more visible bone metastases. I am not saying they are all gone, that is something you can't say and one must be aware with a bone scan does not rule out metastases as they may still be undetectable ones there. If you do see them though, of course, they are there. This diagnostic tool is often misunderstood by patients and also by physicians.

Today this patient has complete resolution of his metastases and the PSA is still unmeasurable which means his tumour is not active. He is not in a wheelchair any more; as a matter of fact he spends time gardening and flying to his son who lives in the States and is feeling generally well.

Of course nobody really believes that success story, because a metastatic prostate cancer of 5 years which has been in the lungs and in the bones, this result is highly unusual as usually with bone cancer life expectancy is only 1-2 years. And here we have a wheel-chaired patient who has recovered so greatly, is now active and flying about and pain-free.

Here is another patient for you with hormone refractory metastatic lung and lymph nodes. The lymph is an additional area of the body that cancer likes to go to, like the lungs, the brain and now even to the liver in younger patients. I had not seen liver cancer before like this, but now it's quite common. 20 years ago I did not see prostate cancer patients who are 29yrs old now I have 2. And I see about 1000 patients a year. Prostate cancer used to be a cancer of the elderly man – aged 60-80, not a young man's cancer.

This patient was 59 and had had radical prostatectomy (removal of prostate gland) and had a recurrent cancer which often occurs to people treated this way. And this treatment is supposed to be the gold standard of treatment for this sort of cancer but this treatment is not very golden. It has an almost 45% failure, that is proven through meta-analysis (looking through all publications.) That could be okay but on top of this there are dramatic side-effects: erections are no longer possible – this means no sex life in almost 100%. It also means in almost 20% of men that go through this procedure have to have 1 diapers due to urinary incontinence. So there are 2 major drawbacks. But still it is considered the gold standard treatment for a selective group of these patients.

The PSA increased in this patient to almost 90 despite complete hormonal blockage, and he started having unclear abnormal pain. Ct scan showed lymphadenopathy with nodules up to 5cm in size. It was also discovered he had hydronephrosis – where urine is backed up towards the kidneys and it can not flow freely from the kidneys to the bladder as the lymphatic tissue squeezes it so urine can not flow. The kidney dies if it is not corrected and the patient doesn't know as it is not painful.

He had a large pulmonary mass (large tumour mass in the lungs.) This patient also refused chemotherapy and started on our treatment. His PSA came down nicely below 0.1 within a year. His CT scan showed lymphadenopathy in February 2002, and by June 2002 you can see it is reduced already by more than 50%. The lung lesion was in right base of lung in February 2002 and now a scan shows there is nothing appearing any more. One can't claim he is cancer-free, but he had no other chance, and he is still alive from 2002 to 2005 despite metastatic cancer to lung and lymph – this is very unusual if you were to ask an urologist or oncologist.

Treatment result to date: he is feeling well with no more lymphadenopathy or hydronephrosis, lung tumours are gone.

Last patient is a 70 year old with a high PSA in 1996. Biopsy and bone scan showed multiple bone lesions. He had 18 months of hormone ablative therapy which failedmany patients do fail in a 12-18 month period. The PSA increased and went up to almost 3000. Bone pain meant he came in a wheelchair with pronounced tumour anaemia. If there is so much bone metastasis than the bone marrow is replaced by tumours and the patient become pale and tired due to lack of red blood cell building. This patient knew from his brother's experience of chemo, who had died from the same cancer that he would not take chemotherapy. At that time though I must say at that time, that chemo was not as good for cancer as it is now. Though we have made progress with chemotherapy protocols, we still do not achieve prolongation of life, but sometimes symptom control.

He decided he'd rather die than have it. He came to the tiny university in Lexington I was working at and started on the protocol. He also received whole body hypothermia to warm up his body temperature close to 40 degrees – this is a very high temperature and has to be done this by anaesthetising the patient. This helps because cancer cells are heat-sensitive and combined with ProstaSol we have a very effective means of controlling and treating hormonal refractory cancer.

His bone scan shows black spots by his head, skull, ribs, spine and his hip was gone that is why he came in a wheelchair. So there was a lot of pain and he was on a lot of pain medication. He also had pronounced tumour anaemia.

His PSA was almost 3000 but came down to 1 or 2 within 2 years. Since March 2000 he has been between these levels. He still has cancer but despite being diagnosed with metastasised cancer in 1996 he is still living with cancer in 2005. He is working.

His bone lesion was greatly reduced and the scan shows a small amount remains in the left rig, but he has no pain any more and no tumour anaemia and he is mobile.

You will ask yourself does this guy only have good cases! Of course not. But it is easy to present good cases and no physician likes to present very bad cases but very astonishingly this protocol works in 2/3rds of patients with the end stage of this cancer. And that is something very unusual, I certainly found it so to begin with and certain cases are unbelievable.

When I present cases to my colleagues in Europe or in USA, I am met with a lot of scepticism and until they see the patients or TV clips from CNN or German TV stations where some of those patients were selected to talk about their experiences.

To summarise the results of 5 years of this protocol:

We have close to 1,250 patients in our database, we have cell culture data and we have a prospective study which shows we can confidently say in about 2/3rds of patients with this type of hormonal refractory cancer stage, we can improve their general condition and their life quality. In about 2/3rds of patients, we see a biochemical response in which tumour progression is suppressed. We see PSA come down by more than 50% from baseline when they started, in 60% we see a reduction of tumour-related pain. Overall this is possible with very little side effects: a little nipple soreness, 5 -10% have minor breast swelling but not the level of swelling from castration through conventional antihormonal drugs such as Zoladex which does not disappear. Here when we reduce the ProstaSol, nipple soreness and swelling reduces. Dyspepsia occurs in 5%.

I want to leave a message for you to take home. It is more for the lay man than doctors who won't often listen to the message I have spent ten years trying to get through and I call this rocking the boat: We know that any bioscopy or any surgery or prostate brachytherapy where you put radioactive seeds into the prostate to carry out radiotherapy – any or those therapeutic or diagnostic measures involving mechanical intrusion with a sharp needle in to the tumour – we know this will cause iatrogenic (caused by doctor's measures) shedding of cancer cells into blood stream which may – I must stress may – lead to early metastases. These diagnostic biopsies are a dangerous tool. The person has to be fit for it, the immune system needs to be strong to cope with the cancer cells- this is the same with breast biopsy.

10 years ago when I first talked about this in Germany at a conference attended by 2000 urologists, I was invited without their knowing I would bring this up. I was booed at which wasn't a very pleasant situation. At time we didn't have any proof it was just a hypothesis. Now in 1996 a method came out called Reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction test – a molecular test capable of finding one prostate cancer cell among 10,000,000 blood cells. This is a very highly sensitive test used to quantify how many prostate cancer cells would be found in a man's peripheral blood after a biopsy. There is method for doing this which will find from 0 -14,000 cells in 1 millilitre.

In patients with BPH (enlarged prostate) we don't find cancer cells 4 weeks after the biopsy.

Here you see after 2 weeks of biopsy a patient in which the needle identified cancer: in 1 millilitre of blood there are now 12,000 copies of tumour cells. That means in 5 litres- 5,000 x 12,000 that is 60 million. No urologists would like to have that injected.

A patient needs to be prepared for biopsy. Phytotherapy with a bioscopy reduces chances of early metastasis as it reduces those cells.

We ask patients to take 3 x 3 capsules a day of ProstaSol, 3x 1 capsule per day of Curcumin Complex, 2 x 1g of BioBran and 2 x 2 capsules of Imupros until 4 weeks after bioscopy and then cells come down fast.

My last message is that too much physician is not good for you!!!

Look what happens when doctors went on strike- these are real facts. In 1973 physicians in Israel go on strike for 1 month and number of funerals reduces by 50%. That was not a singular event: Physicians in Columbia in 1976 go on strike there is a reduction of burials of 38%. Even in the UK, a strike in 1978 meant numbers went down by 40%.

I ask myself maybe physicians should go on a permanent strike for the interest of our patients!!

Thank you.