Drug Cure for Cancer

[akirlu]

Holy shit. An article in New Scientist: Cheap, Safe Drug Kills Most Cancers says that there is an existing drug that kills cancer cells, and only cancer cells, in cultures of human cancers, and radically shrinks cancers in lab rats. Apparently, cancer cells are unique in that they don't use their mitochondria, which contain the self-destruct message for the cell, so the cancer cells never die. Dichloroacetate (DCA) works by switching the cancer cell mitochondria back on and thus causing them to shut down and die. And it's apparently been in use for years for certain rare conditions, so it's known to be fairly safe.

The problem? There's no patent on the drug. So no drug company is going to pay for clinical trials. (There's the benevolence of the invisible hand again.) Current efforts to get clinical trials going are focused on charitable and university funding.

Link thanks to matociquala

Comments

[boxofdelights]

Isn't this the sort of thing the NIH is supposed to be doing?

[cluefairy-j.livejournal.com]

The NIH can fund these kinds of things.

It'd still be a good 15 years from now before it could be put on the market (although, with adaptive clinical trial design in the US that may be able to be shortened)....but still, it'd freakin' be worth it......

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Kind of sucks for people who have terminal cancer now, though.

[cluefairy-j.livejournal.com]

Complete suckage.

[kate-schaefer.livejournal.com]

I am filled with (on the one hand) hope and (on the other hand) rage. This looks like it works. It's not going to be available in time to save people I care about with terminal cancer right now. That would just be tragic, bad timing, if it weren't for the possibility that it won't be available in time to save people I care about (and lots of other people to whom I am individually indifferent while still in theory preferring that they not suffer) ten, fifteen, twenty years down the road, because there's not enough profit in it.

I tried to look at the researchers web site, going through the pointer provided by New Scientist, but it's swamped by the number of people who want to look at it. I wonder if the amount of interest stirred by this reportage will shift some priorities and some funding. I hope so. I want to figure out a way to encourage that shift.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Well, frankly, for people who have terminal cancer right now, this seems like a Going to Mexico moment. If it can be had there, I would certainly consider reading everything that one can get one's hands on about side effects and risks, dosages in rats and for other uses in humans, and then self-medicating.

[kate-schaefer.livejournal.com]

As I dig through other references, it looks less exciting than it did at first. DCA may be great for rats with human cancer, but it causes liver cancer in mice, and peripheral neuropathy in some humans. It will need the same kind of controlled studies that every other promising new drug does.

Still, it seems pretty cool.