Paul Stamets at Tedmed 2011

♪ dreamy electronic music ♪ applause We are now rediscovering that which our ancestors long ago knew- that mushrooms are deep reservoirs for very powerful medicines. In the next 10 minutes, I'm going to describe 4 mushrooms which I think are essential for human health. The first mushroom I want to mention is amadou. Amadou is described by Hypocrites in 450 B.C. as an anti-inflammitory. Well amadou is a birch polypore, but has other attributes as well. You can hollow this mushroom out in the center, put embers of a fire inside, and keep fire alive for days. Moreover, if you boil this mushroom, it delaminates into a cellular fabric. And my hat is made from amadou. Now, another fungal friend I have here, which I want to unveil is agarikon. Agarikon is the longest living mushroom in the world. It was described by Diascribes in 65 A.D. as elexirium adlongem vitum- the treatment against consumption. This mushroom is a resident of the old growth forest. It is now thought to be extinct in Europe. It grows in Northern California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. This mushroom survives in the old growth forest under extremely adverse conditions- hundreds of inches of rain per year, wind, sleet, hail, baking in the sun, and yet it's the longest living mushroom we know today. And may I have the clicker? Thank you So, my partner and wife spend a lot of time in the old growth forest looking for these mushrooms. And to give you some idea how rare agarikon is, although we have 40 strains of agarikon in culture after 30 years- the largest library by far in the world, my dear professor, Dr. Michael Beug, discovered his first agarikon in the old growth forest just these past few weeks, after looking for mushrooms in the old growth forest for more than 40 years. So, agarikon has anti-tubercular properties, and we have now confirmed this working with the U.S. Bioshield Biodefense Program under the guidance of NIH and US AmRad. And sometimes we have to go great extremes to find these mushrooms. This is a 700-year-old douglas fir tree. Our team member has sentenced the tree. We go 100 feet up this tree, and this is the oldest agarikon that we found so far, approaching 100 years in age. Now how is it that this mushroom can survive under microbial attack? And is able to do so because the mycelium is this cellular architecture that is based on a network concept. And we don't need to harvest the mushroom- we just need a small piece of tissue and the mycelium, as it grows, utilizes what we know as apigenesis. It has the amazing ability to adapt. It has host defense strategies against pathogens. And using this information, we've been able to develop some very powerful gateways to new medicines. And these are extracellular droplets that we wash from the mycelium and I'm happy to announce that we have discovered a new class of antimicrobals and antivirals called fomitopsterols- after the Latin name for this mushroom which is fomitopsis officinalis. So powerful are these antivirals that when we do a 100 to 1 dillusion, we are more powerful than ribovirin, against flu viruses and ***. Now mushrooms have other properties which are interesting. So this is a group of cordyceps mushrooms. They're known as entomopathogenic fungi - fungi that kill insects. Insects are in constant dire dance between dinner and death as they go through soils. And cordyceps is a source of cyclosporine. Moreover, just recently the FDA approved Novartis for a new anti-MS drug called Gilenya, which is predicted to be one of the 10 most profitable commercially produced drugs in the history of medicine. But cordyceps has a different face. The cordyceps is a mold, has a mold stage, and they're like 2 faces of the same organism. These spores are very infectious to these insects, and most insects have entomopathogenic fungi that can harm them, so they avoid them with great diligence. But I did something different. I took these cultures of the mold state and I morphed it in a laboratory to a pre-sporulating form. And so the insects avoid these spores, but I've discovered that if you took the mycelium without the spores, something else happened which was truly amazing- they became super-attractants. They became super-attractants to ants, to termites, and a surprising array of other types of other types of insects. And so the insects, in this case an ant, becomes mummified and then boing! of course this mushroom sprouts out of his head. So it goes full circle. Now, we did extracts, again watching the mycelium, and we were able to find that termites would stream directly to the location where the extracts were placed and 3 positive controls and the termites would tunnel specifically to where that location was. Well, I starting trying it against other non-social insects - flys, gnats, mosquitos- and this is a baseline, the flat graph there is the control, and the only difference there is we added the mycelium to the extract. And we have not just attractants, but I've discovered super-attractants. So when I tried it against the mosquitos, and this is where we hit the big homerun, we can attract mosquitos roughly equivalent to a human hand with the extracts. This has profound implications for disease control, for malaria to yellow fever to west nile virus. And so, what can we do? There's lots that we can do. I think we can now control disease vectors- zoonotic diseases cariied by insects across landscapes. And since so many insects and arthropods vector diseases, most of you may not know that H5N1 birdflu is carried by houseflies. This is something that is not widely reported. But because of climate change, sub-tropical diseases are now entering into temperate zones. So being able to control zoonotic pathogens I think is one avenue that will have a positive impact and helping habitats and humans dwelling within those habitats. Moreover, insects and arthropods not only transmit diseases that afflict humans but plants. So the implications of this I think are absolutely enormous. So we can increase the efficiency of bug zappers, we can steer insect migrations across landscapes. This is a paradigm-shifting revolutionary breakthrough on the most fundamental of levels. And moreover, we can attract disease-carrying bugs and blend them with expired antiviral drugs, antimicrobial drugs, or the crude precursors that made those drugs. We can create a panoply of a mixture of these drugs so the disease resistence would not occur. We can distract the insects away from human populations, away from animal populations, away from plant populations. Or we can bring them to a locus and be able to control them. Most of you have heard that the mosquito population on the east coast was 10 times greater this year than it was previously. So another mushroom empowers the immune system, and this is turkey tails. And turkey tail mushrooms have also been used for more than a thousand years. NIH funded our group with a $2.1 million breast cancer clinical study, which has recently been completed. Now this breast cancer clinical study was dealing with a non-ER, non estrogen responsive breast cancer patients - ladies. And the study has come back with some remarkable results. When the patients have radiation therapy, or chemotherapy, their immune system is often times impaired so natural killer cells are decreased. Taking these mushrooms... the adjunct therapy, not as a substitution, but to support the immune system, the natural killer cells increase on a dose-dependant basis. The red bar is no treatment, with 3 grams and 6 grams per day. And then post-radiation, the immune system is depressed, and then a dose-dependant basis, the natural killer cells are enhanced over a period of 4 weeks. This raises base immunity function, which I think is critically important. Now this hit home to me very personally. In June of 2009, when my 84-year-old mother called me up, and says Paul, I have something very serious to talk to you about, but you're always so busy. It's a terrible thing to hear from a mom. I said Mom, what wrong? She's a very happy, genuine person. And she goes I'm worried. And my mother's deeply religious - has not seen a doctor since 1968. She said my right breast is 5 times the size of my left. I have 6 swollen lymph glands the size of walnuts. And her voice started shaking, and I'm not ashamed to admit that I started crying. Why didn't you tell me sooner? We spent a large part of June at the Swedish Breast Cancer Clinic in Seattle. The oncologist examined her, and upon the second examination, she had a 5.5 centimeter in diameter tumor. It metasticized - it went to her sternum, it went to her liver. She had stage 4 breast cancer. The doctor gave her less than 3 months to live. He stated it was the second worse case of breast cancer she had seen as a doctor in 20 years of practice. We had the circle family meeting. Many of you have gone through this. My mom announced that she bought a pine casket, the cheapest one that she could find, because she was going to heaven. But then the doctor said you're too old to have radiation therapy, you can't have your breast removed, but there's an interesting study on turkey tail mushrooms at Bastyr Medical School. You might want to try taking those. Well my son's supplying those! So she was put on Taxol and Herceptin - wonderful drugs - and she started taking 8 turkey tail capsules a day - 4 in the morning and 4 in the evening. And that was in June of 2009. And today, my mother has no detectable tumors. And I'd like to bring my mother up. applause