Safe Cheap Drug Kills Most Cancers - New Scientist

One of the barriers to working full time at home or in a small business is the cost of health insurance. One of the biggest factors in the soaring costs is the price of medication. The system for approving drugs for certain diseases is rigged to favor deep pocket, patentable players. Things you buy now like aspirin and acetaminophen would never be available had they not been grandfathered in.

Here, New Scientist documents a safe, cheap cancer treatment. They have to beg for donations to pass the approval process since the drug cannot be patented.

From New Scientist

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).

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