The rich, creamy avocado, which is increasingly being hailed as healthful, may turn out to be a powerful blood cancer-fighter as well.

Research underway at the University of Waterloo in Ontario say that a professor there has derived a drug from the avocado that could attack acute myeloid leukemia (AML) at its root source.

AML is a potentially deadly blood cancer that generally attacks people over the age of 60 and can prove fatal within five years. There are few treatments worldwide that can attack AML at its stem cell level, but university professor Paul Spagnuolo has done exactly that.

Spagnuolo is among only a handful of researchers worldwide working in a field called nutraceuticals, which applies the pharmaceutical industry's rigorous drug discovery research processes to food-derived compounds.

"The stem cell is largely responsible for the disease developing and it's the reason why so many patients with leukemia relapse. We've performed many rounds of testing to determine how this new drug works at a molecular level and confirmed that it targets stem cells selectively, leaving healthy cells unharmed,” said Spagnuolo.

Spagnuolo’s research on the compound, named avocatin B, is published in the journal Cancer Research. He has also filed for a patent application and is pursuing a commercial partnership to enter clinical trials, which would make it available to patients on an experimental basis.