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It seems that a new drug called DCA is able to kill of cancerous cells while at the same time leaving non-cancerous cells alone. Please express how you feel about this and whether or not you believe that this could possibly be that "miracle cure."

-Article-

Dr. Evangelos Michelakis may have just cured cancer. I thought the highest praise the digirati could give him would be to give pr0pz to his mad skillz, hence the name of the group.

The group’s secondary purpose is to call attention to the problem his cancer cure is facing: drug companies aren’t interested in investing in it. That’s because Dr. Michelakis cured cancer using a substance that cannot be patented and cannot be marketed. He will need another $400-$600 million to complete the research, and DCA already costs around $2 per dose. It is not profitable enough, in other words, to invest in DCA when other chemicals might also do the trick for an outrageous profit margin.

I expect Dr. Michelakis will get his funding. His miracle cure seems almost impossible to script: once further research and stockpiling are complete, the drug could be administered affordably to almost anyone in the world.

Therefore, the secondary purpose of this group is to provide updates as Dr. Michelakis seeks the half-billion necessary to run further tests on his cancer cure. I hope and optimistically expect philanthropy to take up the role required to get this miracle, affordable cancer cure rolling – just imagine if DCA made malignant tissue less expensive to treat than a broken bone! (We are still many years out, but check out the news and click the URL for visual diagrams.)

This description is an article posted 4 hours ago by Andy Coghlan on NewScientist.com (http://www.newscientist.com/article/...cancers.html):

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.

Until now it had been assumed that cancer cells used glycolysis because their mitochondria were irreparably damaged. However, Michelakis’s experiments prove this is not the case, because DCA reawakened the mitochondria in cancer cells. The cells then withered and died.

Michelakis suggests that the switch to glycolysis as an energy source occurs when cells in the middle of an abnormal but benign lump don’t get enough oxygen for their mitochondria to work properly. In order to survive, they switch off their mitochondria and start producing energy through glycolysis.

Crucially, though, mitochondria do another job in cells: they activate apoptosis, the process by which abnormal cells self-destruct. When cells switch mitochondria off, they become “immortal”, outliving other cells in the tumour and so becoming dominant. Once reawakened by DCA, mitochondria reactivate apoptosis and order the abnormal cells to die.

“The results are intriguing because they point to a critical role that mitochondria play: they impart a unique trait to cancer cells that can be exploited for cancer therapy,” says Dario Altieri, director of the University of Massachusetts Cancer Center in Worcester.

The phenomenon might also explain how secondary cancers form. Glycolysis generates lactic acid, which can break down the collagen matrix holding cells together. This means abnormal cells can be released and float to other parts of the body, where they seed new tumours.

DCA can cause pain, numbness and gait disturbances in some patients, but this may be a price worth paying if it turns out to be effective against all cancers. The next step is to run clinical trials of DCA in people with cancer. These may have to be funded by charities, universities and governments: pharmaceutical companies are unlikely to pay because they can’t make money on unpatented medicines. The pay-off is that if DCA does work, it will be easy to manufacture and dirt cheap.

Paul Clarke, a cancer cell biologist at the University of Dundee in the UK, says the findings challenge the current assumption that mutations, not metabolism, spark off cancers. “The question is: which comes first?” he says.





-Here is the link to the hospital that the DCA can be administered at-


http://www.medicorcancer.com/service.html


-and here is the link to the website all about DCA-


http://www.depmed.ualberta.ca/dca/

Taken from another forum.

Sounds like a medical breakthrough? If a company throws money at it, that is.

I call BS.

It's like fusion power - always 50 years away.

Or like Germans - fond of bratwurst and women in lederhösen holding bratwurst while drinking beer.

cannot be patended ... thats a death sentence for it in the medical world

if they find a cure for cancer, its possible they are gonna be death (the ones that discover it).... imagina how many millions does the hospitals, or agencies of cancer win with chemotherapy and all th medicines against it, all those hospital or agencies will loose a lot of mooneeey and it can be the end for them, just because one guy destroyed them

Will be maaaaaany years before it is actually used.

Nice to see a cure is possible though.

Quote from spankmeyer :

I call BS.

Why, because of your years of experience in cellular biology, pharmacology and oncology?

I'm going to keep an eye on this and see what happens. Could be interesting, not only from a medical or scientific point of view. Imagine if DCA showed enough promise to worry pharmaceutical companies enough so that they pressured some governments to avoid funding studies into it - those governments would have a golden opportunity to prove their ethical credentials by doing the right thing and not caving to corporate interests. For once.

However, even if DCA isn't the magic bullet, it seems to have shed some new light on the role of mitochondria in cancer formation, which sounds like a good solid foot in the door to enable other avenues of research which might bear fruit. My best friend's mum died of a non-Hodgkins lymphoma, my cousin and my wife's best mate are both undergoing chemo right now and my aunt survived breast cancer, so anything that can knock this thing down a peg or two is a good thing as far as I'm concerned :up:

If this drug has the potential to cure even 1% of all cancer then they would find funding everywhere. Cancer has ruined many lives and affected millions of people, amoung those people are some of the richest and most powerful people in the world.

Quote from ATC Quicksilver :

If this drug has the potential to cure even 1% of all cancer then they would find funding everywhere. Cancer has ruined many lives and affected millions of people, amoung those people are some of the richest and most powerful people in the world.

But money is the driving force for anything. If you could dream up a way to get every homeless guy off the streets and somehow end up giving each person in the government a few million, they'd all be gone by tomorrow night.

The medical world is the same, there is no money in the cure, only the symptoms. If you cure AIDS you only get money from that, lets say it is $100 to cure AIDS per person. Rounding up the human population to 7 billion, the medical world will get $700 billion from ridding the world of cancer. Fun but why stop there, if you only treat the symptoms and give people longevity, the illness becomes a consistent cash cow.

There already are cures for some types of cancers, but they can't be put into a simple pill. I think this is bs.

As with spankmeyer, I can only presume that comment's based on your years of experience in the relevant fields

The "DCA Update" pdf at this site states that they're on their way to raising enough money for a clinical trial, which is what you do when you're testing the efficacy of a new treatment. I don't see the point in calling "bs" before trials have even started