• 1/10/2005
  • Lexington, Kentucky
  • Ohio State’s James Cancer Hospital as reported by Lex18.com

The next time you’re in the grocery store, try to find fresh black raspberries. Even when they’re in season they can be hard to find, which is too bad, because scientists say black raspberries may be a potent cancer fighter.

So how can you get the benefits of the berries year-round? The answer might be in America’s love of snacking.

Researchers at Ohio State’s James Cancer Hospital have already shown that black raspberries may help prevent colon and esophageal cancers. Now, their latest studies suggest the berries may help battle oral cancer as well. In lab tests, the berries reduced tumors in the mouth by 44 percent. But there’s just one problem.

“For us, we would need to eat about four cups of fresh black raspberries a day,” said Chris Weghorst, PH. D, of the James Cancer Hospital.

So, Weghorst set out to concentrate the benefits of the berries into something easy to eat. Something like cancer-fighting lozenges.

Now, for the first time, researchers will test these lozenges on oral cancer patients.

Doctors will take a sample of tissue from their tumors once, and then do it again after patients have consumed the lozenges for up to three weeks.

“We could evaluate the expression patterns in those two pieces of tissue and identify genes that were specifically responding to a black raspberry treatment,” Dr. Weghorst said.

Chef Renee Bean likes that idea. She has had oral cancer, and even though she works with food every day, she says working cancer-fighting foods into her diet isn’t easy.

“Eating those five-a-days of fruits and vegetables gets stressed, and I do have a difficult time eating that much, I don’t know, I think everybody does,” Bean said.

That’s where the lozenges could come in. If researchers find that certain genes respond to the berry extract in them, it could someday mean a simple new way to fight cancer.

Researchers are also looking into making lollipops from the black raspberry extract.