DCA: A simple, unpatentable cancer treatment?
dca.med.ualberta.ca
dca.med.ualberta.ca
Be aware that this "it's unpatentable" thing is bullshit. You don't patent a drug, you patent the use of the drug for a certain purpose. In fact, Michelakis himself appears to have patented DCA for several cancer forms. http://www.google.com/patents?q=Michelakis&btnG=Search+P...
If there is a huge market for X, there is an economically feasible "unpatentable" enabler of X, then someone is going to make money doing X, and even the law won't be able to stop them.
There's a reason we have the scientific setup that we do, and it is to filer the noise, and protect the authenticity of the science. If these guys from Alberta are able to come back with good results on human trials, then other labs will independently confirm the result. The fact that drug companies aren't picking up research at a preliminary stage on a drug that won't be profitable shouldn't be surprising, but it also doesn't mean that the research won't go forwards.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dichloroacetic_acid#Results_of_...
quoting:
What is most pernicious about the conspiracy-mongering stories being spread about DCA is that it builds false hope. People with cancer hear about this drug, and they think there's an amazing cure out there that's being withheld from them because of the greed of big pharma.
Even though some drugs are indeed more lucrative for them than others, they would not develop cancer drugs if they were not profitable.
This is especially true for cancer drugs marketed to oncologists (which I suspect are never marketed directly to consumers...). The field is very complex ... and I recall that one of the major factors in the difference in outcomes between your local medical system and the major cancer centers is the better current knowledge of the practitioners in the latter.
That marketing and advertising spending is dominated by free and discounted drugs for folks who can't afford list price.
Are you opposed to that spending?
The only problem is that most cancers develop mechanisms to block or inactivate apoptosis pathways of which there are several, so DCA will not work in every type of cancer since these apoptosis pathways need to be intact before cancer cells will die. It is never that simple and some scientists tend to oversimplify the story.
(Note: reported side effect to therapy includes death by gunshot wound)
I think people would prefer to opt for a more expensive treatment plan.
http://www.dca.med.ualberta.ca/Home/Updates/2010-05-12_Updat...
This is a great article from the sciencebasedmedicine guys about the state of dichloroacetate as a cancer treatment. A bit long-winded, but totally realistic about the current prospects. The links at the bottom are all great too.
* Mitochondrias (an organele in our cells that is considered the battery of a cell) in cancer patients typically don't function as they normally should.
* In 2007, University of Alberta researchers led by Evangelos Michelakis, announced a non-human trial that showed promising signs of stopping and regressing cancer using a substance known as DMC.
* DMC is thought to work by fixing bad mitochondrias in cancer patients (obviously over simplified).
* DMC is non-patentable and is easily made, so the news became a big anti-big-pharma story and spread like wild fire because the researchers were having trouble getting funds for doing clinical trials, since there was no money that could be made from this drug if it proved to work.
* The hopes for many cancer patients skyrocketed creating demand for DMC.
* A few ethically challenged entrepreneurs setup websites to sell DMC under the guise of DMC for Pets to get around FDA.
* There are potential side-effects when DMC is mixed with other drugs so a lot of people put their their lives in danger by doing self treatment, but no results were ever posted to the forums. The suspected reason is that the forum admins removed all negative reports.
* The websites were shut down by FDA after some time.
* A couple days ago, Michelakis's team at UofA announced the results of a clinical trial in which they administered DMC to 5 patients. This published in a journal but you can see their announcement at http://www.dca.med.ualberta.ca/Home/Updates/2010-05-12_Updat...
* Of the 5, patient #1, #2 & #5 showed promising results. Patient #3 died (not attributed to DMC) and patient #4 needed a 2nd surgery 3 months after starting, which it didn't specifically say but I assumed to mean that it wasn't considered successful.
* Key things to note:
- the trials where a combination of phase 0
and phase 1 trials.
-- Phase 0 = seek to determine if the drug
is doing biochemically what it is expected
to do based on preclinical studies, usually
by taking a biopsy and doing chemical tests.
-- Phase 1 "are designed to determine two things:
dose and dose-limiting side effects" ...
not efficacy of the drug.
- all 5 were treated differently and in
combination with other treatments.
This makes the tests not reliable
enough to make conclusions from.
- Treatments often show very very promising
signs when dealing with non-humans but fail
when the rubber meets the road in real
clinical trials.
- DMC shows promise but it's dangerous for
people to self-treat and inefficient to
shortcut the scientific process of testing
and evaluating treatments.