Cure for Breast, Lung and Brain cancer?

[Teki187]

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.

Source

Lots and Lots of information about people who have taken it upon them selfs to do clinical trials.

http://thedcasite.com/

Reports in the lay press after the 2007 University of Alberta announcement claim that dichloroacetate "has actually been used safely in humans for decades",[38] but the limited scholarly literature suggests side effects of pain, numbness and gait disturbances in some patients.[38] A clinical trial where DCA was given to patients of MELAS (a form of genetically inherited lactic acidosis) at 25 mg/kg/day was ended prematurely due to excessive peripheral nerve toxicity.[39] Dichloroacetate can also have anxiolytic or sedative effects.[6]
Animal studies suggest that the neuropathy and neurotoxicity during chronic dichloroacetate treatment may be partly due to depletion of thiamine, and thiamine supplementation in rats reduced these effects.[40] However, more recent studies in humans suggest that peripheral neuropathy is a common side effect during chronic DCA treatment, even with coadministration of oral thiamine.[41][42] An additional study reported that 50 mg/kg/day DCA treatment resulted in unsteady gait and lethargy in two patients, with symptoms occurring after one month for one patient and two months for the second. Gait disturbance and consciousness were recovered with cessation of DCA, however sensory nerve action potentials did not recover in one month.[43]

Source

With some reported side effects yet confirmed.

Why wasn't this covered on the MSM? Might be hope yet for people who suffer from these cancers.

 

[Natima]

I cant find anything to say whether there has been any success in human trials.

 

[Heliospherez]

And considering the original article was written in New Scientist in Jan 2007 (and the drug was touted as far back as 2005 as a cancer cure) - I think we would by know by now if it was such a miracle cure.

 

[int]

Anything claimed to be a sudden advance in the treatment of cancer / aids / ageing should be taken with a pinch of salt and you should put further reading into it.

As already said here, the article is from Jan 2007 and their have been no / few records of clinical trials.

Cancer isn't going to be cured by a single miracle drug, all cancers are different and grow under different circumstances via different mechanisms from different cells.

 

[Dave M]

Worrying side effects, perhaps un-proven effectiveness, and the major problem that bringing any drug to market is horrendously expensive, and as noted this drug won't make anyone anything.

 

[int]

Worrying side effects, perhaps un-proven effectiveness, and the major problem that bringing any drug to market is horrendously expensive, and as noted this drug won't make anyone anything.

Unfortunately this is very true and it has stopped potentially helpful drugs being further pursued due to ease of availability already. No one is willing to put in large amounts of money to research the effects on a disease only to find that it works and it is a drug already widely available.

Although I am confused as to why this is the case as a drug that is discovered to be useful in a way that it was not originally intended for can be re-patented under a new name for this new treatment...

 

[Energize]

The phase II DCA cancer trials were suspended ages ago, it all kind of fizzled out presumably due to poor efficacy.