Cheap, 'safe' drug kills most cancers - health - 17 January 2007 - New Scientist

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. We will also follow events closely and will report any progress as it happens.

Update, 16 May 2011: If you've just heard about this story, please read this recent update too.

Article originally published online 17 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....
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Exercise associated with longer survival after brain cancer diagnosis

The finding, published online June 20 in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, adds to recent research that exercise improves how cancer patients feel during and after treatments, and may also extend their lives.

"This provides some initial evidence that we need to look at the effects of exercise interventions, not only to ease symptoms but also to impact progression and survival," said Lee W. Jones, PhD, associate professor in the Duke Cancer Institute and senior author of the study.

Although the study was not designed to test whether regular exercise actually causes longer survival among brain cancer patients, it established a strong correlation that could give doctors and patients a more accurate prognosis of long-term survival.
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