Cheap, Safe Drug Kills Most Cancers

From New Scientist Print Edition.
Updated 14:26 23 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.

Source: www.NewScientist.com

New Scientist has received an unprecedented amount of interest in this story from readers. If you would like up-to-date information on any plans for clinical trials of DCA in patients with cancer, or would like to donate towards a fund for such trials, please visit the site set up by the University of Alberta and the Alberta Cancer Board.

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DCA and CANCER

Wonder Drug or False Hope?

News about a chemical called dichloroacetic acid (DCA), an inexpensive drug that may cure cancer without side effects, is making the rounds of cyber space at warp speed. The research on DCA is being done at the University of Alberta in Canada, led by Evangelos Michelakis. Preliminary research in the test tube and on rats is very promising.

The American Cancer Society Responds

DCA has attracted so much attention that Dr. Len Lichtenfeld, deputy chief medical officer for the American Cancer Society, was moved to write a somewhat testy essay about it on his blog. His overall take on DCA: maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t, don’t get excited about it yet. The conspiracy theorists claim that because DCA has no patent, the drug will never be widely used in cancer treatment because there are no large profits to be made.

The DCA Theory

DCA reportedly works by making cancer cells commit suicide without harming healthy cells. Very simplistically put, most cells produce their energy through tiny furnaces called mitochondria that use oxygen. In tumors, the mitochondria are shut down and the cancer cells turn to an alternate energy-producing process called glycolysis. (Glycolysis depends heavily on sugar, which is one reason why a sugar-laden diet encourages cancer growth.) The theory of DCA is that it switches the mitochondria back on, which kills the cancer cells, largely through a process called apoptosis (a-pop-toe’-sis), which causes old or damaged cells to kill themselves. One of the traits that allows a cell to become cancerous is that it doesn’t die when it’s supposed to.

Dr. Lichtenfeld claims that articles he read (he doesn’t cite them) show that DCA causes liver cancer in rats. However, in the DCA research Michelakis did with rats, there were no side effects.

Buyer Be Aware

This is most definitely an experimental cancer drug that has limited research on rats, and no published research on how it works in humans. The theory sounds good, and if it works as well Michelakis believes it does, it would be an inexpensive cancer treatment with few, if any side effects. The research is being done at a respectable university, not in someone’s garage. And let’s keep in mind that conventional chemotherapy sometimes works, sometimes doesn’t, and almost always has serious side effects. That makes the use of DCA a very personal choice. There are already websites popping up that are selling DCA but there’s no way to know how legitimate they are.

Source: Virginia Hopkins Health Watch