Cancer Breakthrough?

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.

Source:

This looks like it might be a big deal soon, keep an eye on it!

It won’t be a big deal, because it’s a natural product. Capsaisin, another natural product, also kills cancer cells via the same mechanism.

Because there is no vested interest, or profit for natural products, the US government, research universities and big pharma will NOT be in a rush to fund this. They have financial and personal prestige issues with this, and will do their best to put the brakes on anyone who takes the development of DCA seriously. There will be a rush of small underfunded studies, and it will fade into the background.

If I had cancer, I would get my hands on some. Fuck the profiteers and their patent poisons.

[quote]Yo Momma wrote:

If I had cancer, I would get my hands on some. Fuck the profiteers and their patent poisons.

[/quote]

I’d like to hope that you’re wrong, but I can only cram so much naivete’ into any given day. Maybe if enough of us plebes know about this, it won’t go away as easily as it might otherwise…?

[quote]Cunnivore wrote:
Yo Momma wrote:

If I had cancer, I would get my hands on some. Fuck the profiteers and their patent poisons.

I’d like to hope that you’re wrong, but I can only cram so much naivete’ into any given day. Maybe if enough of us plebes know about this, it won’t go away as easily as it might otherwise…?[/quote]

It will go away easily, there is too much money involved for something so simple and unprofitable to be marketed. Another example is Bloodroot.
http://plantcures.com/bloodroot.html

EDMONTON, BABY!

WOO!!!

– ElbowStrike

[quote]Cunnivore wrote:

This looks like it might be a big deal soon, keep an eye on it![/quote]

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.

Lung cancer is by-and-large preventable (don’t smoke) and brain cancer is rare. There are still many other cancers that this doesn’t address (Prostate anyone?). Let alone the fact that it didn’t obliterate the tumors in mice. Not to shoot down their work, but if you ‘kept your eye’ on every drug that had promise, you’d go blind (or broke if you were putting money on it).

IMO, the “silver bullet” for cancer would be like penis enlargement drugs or “the pill”. If a cheap, freely available, grossly effective drug comes along, you won’t need a lab jockey who used it on mice to prove it works. Every man and woman in the free world would know about it.

[quote]Yo Momma wrote:
Because there is no vested interest, or profit for natural products, the US government, research universities and big pharma will NOT be in a rush to fund this. They have financial and personal prestige issues with this, and will do their best to put the brakes on anyone who takes the development of DCA seriously. There will be a rush of small underfunded studies, and it will fade into the background.
[/quote]

While I have to defer to your opinions more than I would others, I don’t think this is necessarily true. There are studies done on “natural products.” True, they aren’t funded to the same extent as patented medication, but that doesn’t mean it will fade away if it does have some use.

I think a Nobel Prize is probably a sufficient motivator for someone to seriously look at a natural product and prove its efficacy.

As far as “putting the brakes” on people who take DCA seriously, what does that mean? Do you really think that there’s a conspiracy, and the governments of the world will all stop research being done on a substance simply because it is effective and not patentable?

[quote]nephorm wrote:

I think a Nobel Prize is probably a sufficient motivator for someone to seriously look at a natural product and prove its efficacy.

[/quote]

People who are not in the sciences don’t understand this concept. Most of the researchers I work with aren’t in it for the money…I am under the impression that most people believe that the research dollars that we get from grants goes in our pockets…