Berberidaceae
Podophyllum peltatum
Mayapple · American mandrake
- Part used
- rhizomefruit
- Native range
- Eastern North America
- Morphology
- A woodland perennial forming colonies of paired umbrella-like leaves, with a single nodding white flower in the fork and a yellow fruit. The ripe fruit is edible; everything else is poisonous.
What is in it
Evidence
Podophyllotoxin is a registered topical treatment for anogenital warts, and semisynthetic derivatives — etoposide and teniposide — are important chemotherapy agents. That is a statement about isolated compounds.
Safety
Systemically toxic. Podophyllin resin applied to large areas or absorbed causes severe neuropathy, bone marrow suppression, vomiting and death, and poisonings from over-application are documented. Ingestion of the rhizome causes severe gastroenteritis and organ damage. Contraindicated in pregnancy — it is teratogenic.
Interactions: Additive myelosuppression with cytotoxic drugs
Regulatory: Podophyllotoxin is a prescription topical medicine. The crude resin is restricted.
Historical use
Used by Cherokee, Iroquois and Penobscot peoples as a purgative and, in some accounts, as a poison. A standard purgative in nineteenth-century American medicine and a favourite of the Eclectics.
Recorded as history and attributed where possible. Long use establishes that a plant was widely used, not that it worked, and not that it was safe.
Worth knowing
Etoposide is one of the more widely used chemotherapy drugs in the world — testicular cancer, small cell lung cancer, lymphoma — and it descends from a woodland plant American frontier doctors used as a purgative.
The route is indirect and worth following. Podophyllotoxin arrests cell division by binding tubulin, which makes it far too toxic to give systemically. Chemists spent decades modifying it and eventually produced etoposide, which acts by an entirely different mechanism — inhibiting topoisomerase II — that nobody set out to find.
So the plant pointed at a molecule, the molecule turned out to be unusable, and the attempt to fix it produced a better drug that works another way. That is a more honest picture of how natural-product pharmacology actually proceeds than the tidy willow-to-aspirin story.
Nomenclature verified against GBIF backbone taxonomy.