Inside STAT: A toxic weed fuels a cancer-drug gold rush — and a quandary

(EROS DERVISHI FOR STAT)

The drug was still experimental, but already it was something of a celebrity. For patients with Gorlin syndrome, a rare genetic disorder, the idea that a gel might reduce the skin cancer surgeries they needed was so seductive it hardly seemed real. In fact, it nearly hadn’t been. The medicine had come from an unlikely place — the wild cow cabbage patches around Manti-La Sal National Forest — on an even unlikelier assumption: that this botanical Gold Rush would yield a treatment for a whole litany of cancers.

In the second half of “The Medicine Hunters,” STAT’s Eric Boodman brings you inside both that drug-finding quest — involving machetes, mowers, and some of the biggest pharma companies in the world — as well as the quest of Gorlin patients to reduce these medications' financial toxicity. Read the story here.