Medicinal mushrooms

Medicinal fungi are those fungi which produce medically significant metabolites or can be induced to produce such metabolites using biotechnology. The range of medically active compounds that have been identified include antibiotics, anti-cancer drugs, cholesterol inhibitors, psychotropic drugs, immunosuppressants and even fungicides. Although initial discoveries centred on simple moulds of the type that cause spoilage of food, later work identified useful compounds across a wide range of fungi.

Although fungi products have been used in traditional and folk medicines, probably since pre-history, the ability to identify beneficial properties and then extract the active ingredient started with the discovery of penicillin by Alexander Fleming in 1928. Since that time, many additional antibiotics have been discovered and the potential for fungi to synthesize biologically active molecules useful in a wide range of clinical therapies has been extensively exploited.

Pharmacological research has now isolated antifungal, antiviral, and antiprotozoan, isolates from fungi.

The fungus with probably the longest record of medicinal use, Ganoderma lucidum, is known in Chinese as líng zhī ("spirit plant"), and in Japanese as mannentake ("10,000-year mushroom"). In ancient Japan, Grifola frondosa was worth its weight in silver, although no significant therapeutic benefits have been demonstrated in humans.

Studies have shown another species of Ganoderma genus, Ganoderma applanatum, contains compounds with anti-tumor and anti-fibrotic properties.

Inonotus obliquus was used in Russia as early as the 16th century, and it featured in Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's 1967 novel Cancer Ward.

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