In addition to its popular role in flavoring ice cream, fudge and cake frosting, vanilla may have a future use as a medicine. Recent laboratory research has strengthened the possibility that a form of vanilla may become a drug to treat sickle cell disease. After specially bred mice received a compound that turns into vanilla in the body, they survived five times longer than mice that did not receive the chemical. All the mice had been subjected to low oxygen pressure, a condition that causes their red blood cells to form the hazardous sickle shape. Results of the study, led by research hematologist Toshio Asakura, M.D., Ph.D., of The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, appeared in the June 2004 issue of the British Journal of Haematology.
