Cheap, safe drug kills most cancers

Posted on Wednesday 31 January 2007

It seems that today is Cancer Drugs day.

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.

Color me skewed, but I find it hilarious that in the wake of all the immigration nonsense in the U.S., none of the names that keep coming up in these articles are Jones or Thompson.

Here’s the full article, thanks to Fabricio for the link.


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