Cheap, safe drug kills most cancers

[Guest guest]

I found this at xenophilia.com/blog/?p=3479 and was hoping there

might be some comments on it. " 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 (Cancer Cell, DOI: 10.1016/j.ccr.2006.10.020).

 

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

(see diagram). 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 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. "