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Gold9472
01-17-2007, 08:06 PM
Cheap, safe drug kills most cancers

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn10971-cheap-safe-drug-kills-most-cancers.html

Andy Coghlan
11:58 17 January 2007

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 results are intriguing because they point to a critical role that mitochondria play: they impart a unique trait to cancer cells that can be exploited for cancer therapy,” says Dario Altieri, director of the University of Massachusetts Cancer Center in Worcester.

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.

Paul Clarke, a cancer cell biologist at the University of Dundee in the UK, says the findings challenge the current assumption that mutations, not metabolism, spark off cancers. “The question is: which comes first?” he says.

AuGmENTor
01-17-2007, 09:30 PM
Ever hear of a product called essiac? I found it on the net years ago. All natural, herbal tea that you brew and drink that has an 80% remission rate. It is also sold as a metabolic maintenance preogram to keep you from getting it in the first place. FDA wont approv it, as its basically a weed, and we all know how our govt feels about those weeds. I'd be curious to see where the thing you're talking about goes.

Gold9472
01-17-2007, 09:34 PM
Ever hear of a product called essiac? I found it on the net years ago. All natural, herbal tea that you brew and drink that has an 80% remission rate. It is also sold as a metabolic maintenance preogram to keep you from getting it in the first place. FDA wont approv it, as its basically a weed, and we all know how our govt feels about those weeds. I'd be curious to see where the thing you're talking about goes.

Ever see this?

http://www.alternet.org/story/9257/

AuGmENTor
01-17-2007, 09:43 PM
No I haven't. Who needs any more evidence to suport the contention that these people are all about the money, and not about what is best for people. My pot smoking days are long over, but if ANYTHING should be illeagal, it should be alcohol. Look at how many deaths can be laid at that drugs feet.

AuGmENTor
01-17-2007, 10:18 PM
http://www.essiacinfo.org/essiac.html

MrDark71
01-18-2007, 10:32 AM
...technically, unless the FDA approves a treatment/drug by law it can't claim to cure anything even with overwhelming clinical data proving otherwise. It'll be a crying shame when they find out powdered snail testicles cures Parkinsons and all this time we were paying Merk for "sympton supressors".

"Its about the comeback customer"-Chris Rock on pharmacutical companies