Scientists Cure Cancer, But No One Takes Notice
 

I wanted to share this with you. It seems cancer research has taken a giant leap forward, but that this research is having a hard time reaching patients and people in general.

Please read : Scientists Cure Cancer, But No One Takes Notice

Another article : The dichloroacetate (DCA) cancer kerfuffle


Basically, there is a drug (dichloroacetate) which may help cure many forms of cancer. It works by reactivating mitochondria, organelles that are functioning in normal cells but not in cancer cells. These organelles are able to kill off their cells by a process called apoptosis and this medicine helps the cancer cell mitochondrias do that.

The "problem" is that dichloroacetate is an old drug which was discovered back in the 1800s and has been used to treat some rare metabolic disorders. It's old enough to be public domain and is unpatentable. No major pharmaceutical companies can patent a sellable DCA drug. You would think that would be a good thing as it means anyone should be able to use it relatively cheaply, but as these companies sell expensive anti-cancer medicines, that means they do not want to support the development of drugs like this which will compete against their own products. So, I was hoping to help spread a little awareness about this.

You know me as a sceptic and I am sceptical in regards to this as well. I don't believe it's the cure which will end all cancer and I think DCA's potential as a cancer drug may so far have been a little exaggerated. But even if it will only help with certain forms of cancer, it still does look promising and as long as it can help, that's another step forwards .. right?

This drug is not available to people with cancer in Norway, but if it garners some attention, universities and so on can get enough donations so that they can afford to start clinical trials etc. Help spread the word. :)

According to wikipedia while the drug isn't formally available there are plenty of patients, doctors, and scientists using and administering it in a non-clinical environment as a non-approved drug. Same as it does demonstrate some biochemical modifications but no actual improved survival. It's a good starting point. Though, where it does act like a carcinogen in large doses are we really just trying to fight fire with fire here?

Also where dichloroacetate is a trace product only created as a side effect of chlorinating water... does this mean drinking from the public pool will help keep cancer away?

There was a news story here about a guy who had cancer and got treated with DCA in Canada which rapidly decreased the size of his tumour. Doctors in this country can't and won't treat people with it unless they're willing to break the law. As for efficiency, I believe the reason it can't be said to have demonstrated improved survival is that there has not been enough large scale clinical trials to test it as a drug for cancer yet. Hence, a lot of the evidence for its effectiveness will be anecdotal or come from animal experiments.

As for the side effects, they are supposedly quite trivial. There are negative side effects if dosages are too large, but that goes for any drug - or even clear, clean water for that matter. At a certain dosage, just about anything can be toxic.

I tried to tell my neighbor who got bone cancer a few months ago about this, but he didn't seem very interested and I didn't wanna push it on him (or make it seem like I knew more about cancer than him). I know when I get cancer (cause we're all gonna get it in the future) I'll use this stuff, but it will be hard to spread the word about it because they haven't done extensive clinical trials, it's not patentable, and who's gonna believe someone who says they've found the cure for cancer? It sounds a little far-fetched.

(found out about this on Stumbleupon btw)

Wow, this really needs to be developed. Thanks for sharing, tore. I'll spread this around where I can.

Cheers for the info tore. Spreading the word on Twitter, quite a few RT's already, and many more doing the same.

What types of cancer are susceptible to DCA? I'd like some more information to share with my friends and I'm too lazy to do the research myself.

Interesting to note that the university doing the research haven't updated their website since 2010, the last tests involved 5 patients, and there were high dosage side effects.

This story is going around like a chain mail it seems. Its bunk.



Also, Cancer is a collective term for literally thousands of different illnesses, like the common cold is an umbrella term for lots of different virii. It won't be "Cured" all at once, it will be systematically hunted down piece by piece.

I don't want anything that effects mitochondria. clearly you never played Parasite Eve..

It's likely slow going because large clinical trials cost a lot of money and there's no financial backing from pharmaceutical companies and one of the universities supposedly backed out leaving one of the research teams financially stranded. One of the points here is raising a little awareness so that hopefully, researchers will get funding to work on this. After all, you can't just capture people with cancer and drug them. And 5 people is not nearly enough data for anything much.

And so what about high dosage side effects? As I wrote earlier, just about anything is toxic at a high enough dosage. Even regular painkillers can be harmful, you know that.

Not saying you shouldn't be sceptical, I'm just wondering how you can call it bunk at this point. After all, current evidence suggests that it is effective in treatment against cancer.

>> Source : http://dca-information.pbworks.com/f...oroacetate.pdf

This is the (afaik) the latest study that they finally raised enough money to do and it's very small scale. As you can see, it concludes that DCA does reduce size of brain tumors at a dosage which is smaller than needed to cause the (reversible) negative side effects and the final conclusion is that it may be a viable therapeutic approach in the treatment of brain cancer.


According to the article quoted above, it helps against brain tumors that form in glial cells which are helper cells in the brain which, among other things, provide insulation for neurons. I believe it's the most common form of brain cancer.

edit :

I agree it's likely it won't be effective in treatment of all cancers, but while there are different kinds, it's worth pointing out that cancer cells across different types generally do share some important traits, like being able to keep their telomers intact with each cell division. The drug targets something which is widely common across different kinds of cancer; non-functional mitochondrias.