interesting article
interesting article newscientist.com/article/dn10971-cheap-safe-drug-kills-most-cancers.html
I found this article from New scientist, not sure if its been posted already.
Good update Glad to see that there seems to be progress on this.
It isn’t the only potential product to target glycolysis. 3-bromopyruvate does as well (I think that scientists at M.D. Anderson are developing this further now). That also worked really well in rats, so maybe scientists are on to something with glycolysis.
new scientist I read the article and gosh it gives us hope.
There’s more as well The University of Alberta has a section of their website that provides all of the articles. After reading them, I can see why this is a big deal. Apparently because DCA has been safely used in humans, including children before, this could get into use fairly quickly. I figure that if it works this could help some cancer patients who currently lack good treatments, such as patients in the world’s poorest countries, and those who suffer more from very harsh treatments, such as children and the very old.
The scientists need to get approval for a trial and the money together as well. They are trying to raise at least some of the money necessary through their website. It’s nice to see a scientists at least try to get a trial moving on a non-patented medicine. I think the best strategy is to give them a little now so they can do their phase I/II trial and then, if it works out, I will give them more.
Many positives here. I feel hopeful about this drug as it has already been trialled in human beings.
It would be cheaper than other drugs… That means it could help so many more people.
It will work for so many cancers and that would be marvellous.
I read also that a university in St Louis is working on attacking tumours with HIV.
I wish it didn’t take so long to get from the early discoveries until the final release of the drugs.
Pollyanna
DCA What concerns me is the articles I have read make a fuss over the fact that this is not really patentable (in its current form) and so the big pharma. companies will not be interested in it. If the potential is so great, why can’t some of the cancer charities that raise so many millions, fund clinical trials? The drug has already been used for decades to treat mitochondrial disorders and so is already proven safe for human usage though as with any drugs, there are side effects.
Jennifer.
They are applying They have made it clear that they are applying for funding from a variety of sources.
The problem is that there isn’t alot of money for trialling non-patented medicines, considering that phase I/II trials cost hundreds of thousands of pounds to run. CRUK is starting up a programme to do this, but I don’t know if the reach would extend to Canada. The US National Cancer Institute is also good at funding this sort of stuff, but tends to fund studies in the US and there is alot of competition (plus they are facing budget cuts). Canada isn’t nearly as good about funding cancer research as the US is (for one thing, it is a much, much smaller country) and funding applications are a slow process. The most conservative estimate of the cost of developing a drug that I have seen is 200 million, which is alot of money in anyone’s book.
I think it is good that they are trying to keep this drug in the public domain. I was really upset when I read of another researcher who found that an off patent drug killed off cancer cells and her first thought was that she would have to alter it so she could patent it before she even tried it out in rats and I thought to myself that that was really just slowing things down. Now, it could quite possibly be the case that the unaltered drug isn’t effective enough, but isn’t it worth testing that out just in case it might save lives sooner? Molecules can be altered to make them more effective and then patented at any time, but alot of people might benefit from at least having access to the unmodified treatment. And she was in the US, where I know that there are some funds available for testing off patent medicines.