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Courtesy of Landscapes Magazine, Winter 2005, published by Farm Credit Bank of Texas.

Southwest Texas ACA customer Joel Curtis is the largest known oleander grower in the United States, if not the world. With 10,000 plants on 17 acres, his oleander orchard is a sight to behold when the plants’ rose-red blossoms are at their best.

But few people will ever see the rows and rows of blooming bushes on Curtis’ Medina County farm. That’s because these oleanders are not destined for landscaping purposes, but for use in a potential cancer-fighting drug.

Curtis is the exclusive oleander grower for Phoenix Biotechnology, a San Antonio firm that is producing a botanical drug known as Anvirzel from an extract of the toxic Nerium oleander. Anvirzel, which has passed the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Phase I clinical trial, offers hope against solid-state tumors and certain viral diseases.

“It is more than a field of dreams,” he claims, referring to the 17-acre plot of land that has belonged to his wife Janet’s family since 1877. “It’s a field of life.”

Curtis began working with Phoenix Biotechnology seven years ago, when the company was looking for a farmer with experience growing horticultural and nontraditional crops. At the time, he had 1,000 fig trees and a pecan orchard on the farm near D’Hanis, Texas, 50 miles west of San Antonio, and a career behind him as an entomologist specializing in pecans and peanuts.

Like any good scientist, Curtis did his research first. “When you plant any kind of orchard, you have to live with it. You don’t go out and tear it up, like you do with cotton, if it’s not working,” he explains.

He contacted friends in the research community at Texas A&M University, his alma mater, as well as at the University of California at Davis, and discovered that essentially he was blazing a new horticultural trail. “There is no experience out there in establishing an oleander orchard,” he says.

Curtis and his son, Dr. Jeff Curtis of Uvalde, started the orchard in 1999 with the help of 25 employees, measuring and hand-planting the bushes at 60-inch intervals. Originally, they had 11,000 oleander bushes.

“It took a Herculean effort to get this orchard established,” Curtis admits.

He also had the financial backing of Southwest Texas ACA. “We are very pleased that Joel and Janet Curtis chose us to provide financing for their farming operations,” says Rick Rothe, Southwest Texas ACA chief executive officer. “There appears to be a trend in production agriculture toward small, niche producers and very large commodity farmers, with fewer and fewer midsized farms. Our association is ready to help all of them succeed by providing reasonably priced financing and loan officers that understand their needs.”

In the oleander orchard, the rows run from east to west to maximize the plants’ exposure to the sun and to preserve the ground plastic in the hot afternoon sun. The ground is covered with this 20-year plastic, which prevents weed development while allowing water to pass through.

Curtis developed his own drip irrigation system, which uses more than 55,000 feet of 1-inch polyester pipe. Each plant receives 40 to 50 gallons of water every 10 to 15 days, depending on weather during the growing season.

“It is important to maintain continuity throughout the orchard, so the nutrients and water have to be controlled,” explains Curtis, who primarily uses fertilizers developed by Medina Agricultural Products in nearby Hondo.

Fortunately, Curtis’ experience prepared him for the pest problems that can develop in a monoculture, even in xeriscape plants like oleanders.

Initially, he treated the young oleander leaves for aphids by washing them off with high-pressure water spray. He has since switched to orange oil for pest control, so that no water touches the leaves except rainwater.

While the toxic oleander flowers may be beautiful, it is the toxic leaves that are important in the Anvirzel manufacturing process. The leaves are harvested by hand, in either May or June. When the farm begins full production, the crop will be harvested every 6 to 8 weeks, from spring through fall.

The oleanders reach maturity at four years of age. They are pruned each season to encourage new leaf production and to reduce the incidence of pathogens and insects in the old leaves and cane. The pruned cane is composted and returned to the soil.

Medina Agriculture developed a process that implodes the leaves into a powder. The powder is then shipped to Phoenix Biotechnology’s production plant, Drogueria Comercial Suprema, in Honduras, where the Anvirzel compound is extracted from the plant material and freeze-dried.

Curtis admits that the orchard is labor-intensive and high-maintenance. Every plant is inspected periodically during each irrigation cycle to make sure it meets the quality standard necessary for drug development. Regardless of the work, he feels privileged to be part of the oleander research project and the Anvirzel production process.

“It is truly rewarding to know you are helping society fight a horrible disease,” Curtis says. “It is the American farmer who brought this country to prominence, and it will be the American farmer who takes this country into the future with biotechnology.”

In Curtis’ vision, everyone involved in the development and testing of Anvirzel has a hand on a spear that they are trying to drive into the heart of cancer, giving hope to cancer patients and their families. “Without hope, there is no future. We are developing something beyond a cancer-fighting drug. We are developing the future of hope with our field of life,” he says.

Don’t be fooled by the attractive red, pink or white flowers of the oleander growing in your yard. Nerium oleander is one of the most toxic shrubs found in landscapes throughout the South and Southwest.

Fresh or dried, even tiny amounts of the plant — including the flowers, leaves, stalk and root — are lethal to both humans and animals. During ancient times, it was used as a poison. Even the smoke from burning oleander plants causes severe irritation to the body.

Oleander contains the toxins, oleandrin and nerioside, which are similar to the toxins in foxglove. While Phoenix Biotechnology has found a way to extract the oleandrin compound and use it in the laboratory to create a botanical drug that may help fight cancer, you should never ingest any part of the plant or attempt to use it for medicinal purposes on your own. To do so could be fatal.

According to Dr. Robert A. Newman, codirector of the Pharmaceuticals Development Center at M.D. Anderson and the professor of cancer medicine who is leading the oleander extract research, Anvirzel appears to be highly effective against human tumor cells in tissue cultures. “I think this represents a new approach to treatment of cancer,” he says.

In addition, Anvirzel shows indications of being an immunomodulator, an agent that stimulates the immune system, Crandell Addington, chief executive officer of Phoenix Biotechnology, reports.

His company anticipates entering into a Phase I FDA Clinical Trial in 2006 with its new formulation of oleander extract, currently under development. If the trial is successful, the firm plans to initiate Phase II trials shortly thereafter.

Meanwhile, Phoenix Biotechnology has chosen to make Anvirzel available from their affiliated company in Honduras, where the drug is approved for sale. They have shipped it all over the world.

“We felt we had a humanitarian reason to get it out there,” says Addington, a former oilman and, interestingly, a poker legend who helped create the World Series of Poker.

Stressing that Anvirzel “is not a silver bullet,” Addington suggests that Anvirzel may fit into a new paradigm of cancer treatment, in which cancer is treated as a chronic condition rather than as an acute illness.

And if it does, he adds, “Joel Curtis will find it necessary to expand his ‘field of life’ to accommodate demand.”