Trials broken off after 'miracle cancer cure' fails to deliver

Trials of a supposed "miracle cure" for cancer found in New Zealand green-lipped mussels have been stopped.

Queensland company Pharmalink has stopped financing the research after deciding the extract does not work.

Adelaide scientist Dr Henry Betts, who discovered supposed anti-cancer properties in Lyprinol in 1999, called the decision "ridiculous".

He said the trial was in phase one. Lyprinol's safety was being tested on people who had advanced cancers and had tried all other treatments.

The trial of 50 men with prostate cancer and 50 women with breast cancer began in Adelaide last year.

Participants were taking up to 12 capsules a day and, even in patients with a poor prognosis the results were "a little encouraging", Dr Betts said.

He is now working on similar properties in an extract from the gut of a North Atlantic sea cucumber.

Controversy and near hysteria followed an announcement from Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Adelaide in 1999 that Lyprinol killed cancer cells in laboratory tests.

The claim sparked massive demand for mussels, with supermarkets in New Zealand selling out.

More than a million dollars worth of Lyprinol, a dietary supplement, was sold on its first day of release on August 2, before it was withdrawn for being promoted as a cancer cure in breach of the Medicines Act.

The Ministry of Health took Lyprinol (New Zealand) Ltd and Pacific Pharmaceuticals to court and they were fined about $15,000 each.

Jim Broadbent, director of the Melbourne company MacLab, which first produced the substance and sold the patent rights to Pharmalink, declined to say how much of the extract was supplied to Pharmalink.

But he said MacLab, which runs mussel farms in the Marlborough Sounds and Coromandel, had doubled its supply of the extract to Pharmalink in the past two years.

Lyprinol is now on sale as HPME (highly purified marine lipid extract), without any claims of cancer-fighting properties.

A spokeswoman for Pacific Pharmaceuticals said about 150 packs of 50 tablets were sold a month.

- NZPA