A Cure For Cancer

[dairygirl4u2c]

bottom line is the last paragraph

[quote]For many years, people who have metabolic disorders rooted in mitochondrial mutations have used an unassuming chemical called dichloroacetate (C[sub]2H[sub]2Cl[sub]2O[sub]2), or DCA, as part of their therapy. This compound acts in the mitochondria to boost aerobic respiration, the process by which most cells burn glucose to produce adenosine triphosphate (C[sub]10H[sub]16N[sub]5O[sub]13P[sub]3), or ATP. This process usually occurs in three steps. The first step, glycolysis, does not require oxygen (O2) and occurs in the cytoplasm. The product of this step is two molecules of pyruvate, also called pyruvic acid.

What happens next depends on whether or not oxygen is present. In normal cells, if oxygen is present, the pyruvate (C[sub]3H[sub]4O[sub]3)enters the mitochondria, where it is further processed through the Krebs cycle (also known as the citric acid cycle). The last step is to pass electrons picked up during glycolysis and the citric acid cycle down an energy gradient called the electron transport chain. As electrons fall, the released energy is used to pump protons across the inner mitochondrial membrane against their own gradient. The protons then naturally find an exit and travel passively down their concentration gradient back across the membrane. As this happens, energy from the downward movement of the protons adds phosphates to adenosine diphosphate to make ATP. A single glucose molecule can ultimately yield between 36 and 38 ATPs through this process of aerobic (with oxygen) respiration.

But under some circumstances, oxygen may not be present or abundant enough. When that happens, the pyruvate undergoes an anaerobic breakdown process that ends in production of lactic acid, also called lactate (C[sub]3H[sub]6O[sub]3). When someone runs up many flights of stairs, shaky legs are the result of lactic acid buildup that occurs as oxygen is depleted. This process is not nearly as productive as aerobic respiration, yielding only four total ATP molecules to use as an energy resource.

People who have mitochondrial metabolic disorders benefit from DCA because it boosts activity of the enzyme that delivers pyruvate from the cytoplasm to the mitochondrion, making up for lost mitochondrial activity. In the 1930s, a scientist named Otto Warburg postulated that the mitochondria in cancer cells also may be partially or completely shut down and that cancer cells thus must rely on the lactic acid cycle for energy production. Since he proposed this idea, researchers have argued extensively about whether or not the out-of-commission mitochondria of cancer cells cause the cancer or are a product of it. Yet his idea made sense to many investigators because a tumor often must grow without an oxygen supply, at least until it becomes vascularized and receives oxygen through blood flow.

Regardless, DCA is known to boost mitochondrial activity, and researchers in Canada took advantage of that fact to test DCA's effects on cancers, both in vitro (in test tubes), and in vivo (in living rats). They found that DCA's effect was to turn the silent mitochondria of cancer cells back on. This resurrection not only set in motion the process of aerobic respiration, but it also did something else. In addition to being cellular powerhouses, mitochondria have the job of flipping the cell's self-destruct switch when things go mortally awry. In vitro and in vivo, the researchers found that cancer cells exposed to DCA committed suicide, undergoing a process called apoptosis, with tumors shrinking in the rat in vivo models.

This sounds like the silver bullet scientists have been looking for, especially considering that DCA was effective against many different kinds of cancer cells. But here's the catch: DCA is an old compound and not patentable. It's unlikely that any drug company will go through the billion-dollar contortions required for Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval to use DCA as a cancer drug when the patent cannot be owned. One possibility is that a drug company will develop a chemical like DCA, patent it, and make billions off a newly created, expensive cancer-fighting drug when the inexpensive, human-tested original sits at medicine's fingertips, but just out of reach.[/quote]

[N/A Gone]

Im gonna bounce this to a couple prof's I know. My hope is it would work, but the very idea of what the can do could cause so much damage if something wrong happened. I imagine the "risk" is the bigger issue.


We could just tell the gov't that cancer is a terrorist and this fits as a war on terror

[Mateo el Feo]

Quoting the wiki ([url="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dichloroacetate#Potential_cancer_applications"]link[/url]):[quote]DCA is a non-patentable molecule. Concerns have therefore been raised that without pharmaceutical industry interest, trials of DCA may not be funded. However, other sources of funding exist; previous studies of DCA have been funded by government organizations such as the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and by private charities (e.g. the Muscular Dystrophy Association).[/quote]
The NIH has a budget to do studies for things like this. I found two "hits" for dichloroacetate (DCA) on their clinical trials website ([url="http://www.clinicaltrials.gov"]link[/url]), but they're not cancer-related.