Cheap, safe drug kills most cancers

New Scientist has received an unprecedented amount of interest in this story from readers. If you would like up-to-date information on any plans for clinical trials of DCA in patients with cancer, or would like to donate towards a fund for such trials, please visit the site set up by the University of Alberta and the Alberta Cancer Board. We will also follow events closely and will report any progress as it happens.

It sounds almost too good to be true: a cheap and simple drug that kills almost all cancers by switching off their “immortality”. The drug, dichloroacetate (DCA), has already been used for years to treat rare metabolic disorders and so is known to be relatively safe.

It also has no patent, meaning it could be manufactured for a fraction of the cost of newly developed drugs.

Evangelos Michelakis of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and his colleagues tested DCA on human cells cultured outside the body and found that it killed lung, breast and brain cancer cells, but not healthy cells. Tumours in rats deliberately infected with human cancer also shrank drastically when they were fed DCA-laced water for several weeks.

DCA attacks a unique feature of cancer cells: the fact that they make their energy throughout the main body of the cell, rather than in distinct organelles called mitochondria. This process, called glycolysis, is inefficient and uses up vast amounts of sugar.

This kind of logic has always escaped me. The people that need this kind of drug are already dieing. What do they have to loose? Get them to sign off on it and use it!

Not all cancer patients are dying. These days, many cancers can be successfully treated. Would you pull someone off a potentially successful treatment regimen to test this drug?

This is not the only experimental treatment available for cancers. For every type of cancer, there are dozens of studies using promising new meds. This is just another promising new med.

While the drug companies might not pursue this research, there are certain to be university/non-profit/government studies. Who knows, DCA might even live up to its hype. Unlikely, but possible.

What I find interesting here is the anti-pharmaceutical company spin in most of the reporting on DCA chemotherapy. The leftist fantasy operating here is that people are dying because evil capitalist Big Pharma won't invest in an unpatentable product. As though all drug research was carried out by drug companies, and none by other institutions. This is trivially false, but hatred of capitalism blinds leftists to the obvious.

One finds a similar meme in the left's revisionist reporting of Big Tobacco's culpability in cancer deaths. Tobacco companies lied, millions died! As though tobacco companies were the only source of information about the health hazards of tobacco, or were somehow a more credible source of information that the many independent medical researchers who repeatedly showed tobacco to be a carcinogen, as far back as the 1940s. As though the popular press had never reported on the dangers of tobacco. As though what obviously happened, never happened.

Here's another example. Some leftists blames Ronald Reagan for increasing the number of AIDS deaths, because he took too long to mention the disease in his speeches. As though there were thousands of gay males who listened closely to Reagan's every word, who would have stopped having unprotected anal sex if Ron had only asked. As though all the warnings from the Centers for Disease Control and other health authorities meant nothing, all the media publicity meant nothing, but a few words from Reagan would have caused gays to change their behavior.

Pathologically delusional.

Edmonton Global News television report on dichloroacetate cancer cure and interview with discoverer Dr. Evangelos Michelakis, Department of Medicine, University of Alberta.

Click here to watch :

http://www.depmed.ualberta.ca/dca/videos/New%20Movies/Global_news.wmv

It shrunk the cancer by 70% in three weeks in mouse trials. If DCA works in humans as well it worked in rats with intractible human cancers then many insanely expensive cancer therapies and the uncounted thousands (possibly millions) of high paying jobs financed from the life savings of cancer patients is going to suffer an insanely big decrease because DCA is cost-free in comparison to anything else, twice (or more times) as effective, and virtually free of uncomfortable side effects (no nausea, no hair loss, no coronary stress).

Some leftists blames Ronald Reagan for increasing the number of AIDS deaths, because he took too long to mention the disease in his speeches. As though there were thousands of gay males who listened closely to Reagan's every word, who would have stopped having unprotected anal sex if Ron had only asked. As though all the warnings from the Centers for Disease Control and other health authorities meant nothing, all the media publicity meant nothing, but a few words from Reagan would have caused gays to change their behavior.

You make a good point. And the real pathological irony here is that throughout all of this (and continuing to the present) the gay lobby has vehemently denied AIDS is a primarily gay disease. So how can Reagan or anyone else be complicit in gay AIDS deaths if it is not a gay disease in the first place?

IMO, the group MOST responsible for gay AIDS deaths is the gay lobby. They have blocked any (preventative) action that would reduce the spread of the disease. Talk about dying for a politcal cause.

I'd think more like adding this drug on a trial basis to other treatments

Sure, why not.

I tried briefly to locate a source of DCA on the Internet, to see what restrictions were applied to its sale. I didn't come up with much, but one guy said that the drug could be purchased without a prescription by businesses. Some docs are sure to be be willing to write prescriptions for it to those in need, after the patients sign the appropriate consent forms.

I'm sure that given the press it has received, there is now a substantial black market for the drug. Also, I bet that DCA, or something labeled as DCA, is now flying off the shelves of Mexican pharmacies.

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