Notice the Marxist comment and the conspiracy theorist comment at the bottom...just wow. "OMG teh big pharma did not already discover this 100 years ago!!!"
Posted on 02/02/2007 7:33:20 PM PST by alnick
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at newscientist.com ...
Side effects?
Side effects? Not being dead?
Actually -
Dichloroacetate safety (see http://www.stanford.edu/group/hopes/treatmts/ebuffer/j4.html)
There is some concern about the toxicity of dichloroacetate. Accumulations of dichloroacetate in groundwater have been described by some reports as a potential health hazard. However, concern about dichloroacetate toxicity is mainly based on data obtained in rats who were administered dichloroacetate at doses thousands of times higher than those to which humans are usually exposed. In these animals, chronic administration of dichloroacetate was found to cause liver problems and tumors. (Stacpoole, 1998.) In contrast, the dosage given to most humans is much lower than that administered to the rats. In clinical trials where dichloroacetate is used as a medical drug, no major side effects have been reported. Dichloroacetate is currently the most effective treatment for a disease known as congenital lactic acidosis (CLA). People with CLA have defective PDC enzymes and are thus unable to efficiently produce energy. In one study, patients with CLA were treated with 25-50 mg of dichloroacetate per 1 kg of body weight. No major complications were observed in the participants. (Stacpoole, 1997.) However, more research is currently being done to study the possible toxicity of dichlororacetate.
All I know about it is what's in the article, but it does say this: "The drug, dichloroacetate (DCA), has already been used for years to treat rare metabolic disorders and so is known to be relatively safe."
It's a carcinogen, lol.
bump for later read.
From Wikipedia:
Although dichloroacetate "has actually been used safely in humans for decades" its therapeutic use can cause pain, numbness and gait disturbances in some patients.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dichloroacetic_acid
"....pharmaceutical companies are unlikely to pay because they can’t make money on unpatented medicines"
Sad, but true.
Notice the Marxist comment and the conspiracy theorist comment at the bottom...just wow. "OMG teh big pharma did not already discover this 100 years ago!!!"
I thought not being dead was the objective, not a side effect.
Interesting that it says TINY doses work. Perhaps that would reduce the side effects. However, the side effects, if self-limiting in duration, are a small price to pay to kill the cancer cells.
I had a couple of doctors read another article about this a couple of weeks ago.
It is not in the human stage yet from what they read, would take lots of time.
They hope it works, and looks interesting to them.
They think it is a time off for public use though.
"Side effects?"
Sleepiness (somnolence)
Dizziness
Dry mouth
Weakness or loss of strength (asthenia)
Raised levels of cholesterol and triglycerides in the blood
Seizures
Persistent painful erection of the penis (priapism)
Raised blood sugar levels (hyperglycaemia)
Explosive diarrhea (caca-poopoo-mia)
Dyslexia
Inflammation of the head (hugeheadism)
Sudden desire to run for political office
Spontaneous Combustion
Death (dropdeadism)
The priapism part doesn't sound too bad...
Especially if that is combined with the "explosive diarrhea".
I got to sit in on a cancer talk last year.... It seems that promising drugs tested recently (ones that shrink tumors) were not shown to benefit patients. People just died with smaller tumors.
Interesting ... one of the tests was to "cure" mice by giving them DCA via their drinking water. Potentially, areas with contaminated groundwater might actually be the anthesis of cancer clusters like the one in Woburn, Mass. featured in that John Travolta movie or, of course, Erin Brockovitch. I wonder if anyone is doing the research to find the cancer voids as well as the clusters.
LOL!
Neurotoxicity at 25 mg/kg/day:
OH MY GOD! It's got CHLORINE on it!!! (I know a bunch of folks here in CA who'd respond exactly that way...)
Probably not - no potential lawsuits there.
I'm a quite skeptical about how effective this will be, but I look forward to the trial results, and hopefully it will turn out well.
Very interesting. Thanks for the post.
Is this an infomercial?
= = = marker = = =
(hugeheadism)(caca-poopoo-mia) & (dropdeadism) all sound terrible. I know I am going to have bad dreams tonight.
read tomorrow ... ;-)
So sorry to hear that. I do pray he stays well for you longer.
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!
As opposed to an excruciatingly painful death from cancer. Hmmm...
To read later.
The problem is your logic is illegal according to the FDA and these companies are open to false lawsuits as it is.
I agree, let some dying folks try it if they wish, but they don't like to let them do that in the governing regulating bodies. That is the big problem for many IMO.
Some may be on cancer drugs already and it could be they do not know yet the way this interacts with those issues for starters and that is another avenue to get sued over.
When someone dies, there is always these days a relative looking for a lottery sized pay day in court.
Chemo drugs generally aren't judged by their side effects.
"For decades, researchers largely assumed that a poison's effects increase as the dose rises and diminish as it falls. However, scientists are increasingly documenting unexpected effects—sometimes disproportionately adverse, sometimes beneficial—at extremely low doses of radiation and toxic chemicals."
Read it at Counterintuitive Toxicity .
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.
I'd think more like adding this drug on a trial basis to other treatments, especially when the other treatments are not known to work very well, or offering it in cases where the patient simply does not want the other treatments due to side effects.
I'm praying that there is something to this and if so, the FDA gets behind it and fast tracks the trials.
But you must remember that the amount of DCA that was used in these animals to cause liver problems and tumors was many times more than a human medicine controlled dose would be. In fact, more than would be used in a human life time.
Wasn't it science that told us that water causes cancer a few years ago?
Your wife would beg to differ.
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).
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.
Sounds like a simple enough molecule.
Bet Sherwin-Williams or (gasp) Exxon could manufacture it.
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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