Dean's World

An interesting story. To quote:

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.

Now, which of the saintly pharmaceutical companies will step forward to provide the clinical trials, knowing that they won't make much of any money off of them?

Yeah. I'll hold my breath.

We've actually known for decades now that vitamin C in megadose quantities kills cancer cells. How many clinical trials have been conducted on that? A tiny handful, decades ago, and they only used oral dosages. A couple of years ago one very small study was done using vitamin C on cancer patients intravenously and showed some signs of success, but the study was too small to be definitive.

You'd think government agencies would be scrambling to fund this sort of research, right? Because they're the ones who supposedly have no financial interests in research? Yeah, right. The system is far too rife with conflicts of interest, and a very dysfunctional "peer review process" for allocating grant monies, for that to work.

My bet is that the dichloroacetate news will fade into the background very quickly. Because neither the US government, nor any major university, nor any private company (pharma or otherwise) will have the least bit of interest in funding further studies. There will be a small handful of tiny, underfunded studies, and that will be that.

Indeed, already those with vested financial and personal prestige issues will be doing their best to put the brakes on anyone who takes this development seriously. Not because the megacomplex of big government and big business wants to kill people--it doesn't, there are few if any mustache-twirling villains--but because of the age old factors of bureaucracy, personal pettiness, ego, and conflicts of interest.

I hope I'm wrong. I don't think I am. They'll already be working hard to pooh-pooh this, and at the first sign that there may be any side effect at all they'll leap on it as proof that this is much too dangerous and that science should be left to people like them who have more serious drugs to test.

Anyone wanna bet?

This part made me laugh:

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.

Most research universities nowadays are deeply in bed with commercial interests. They won't fund it. And government? I already told you. If you're working under the delusion that our brave National Institutes of Health is anything but a massive institution rife with corruption and croneyism, you're crazy.

Unless this stuff proves so instantly miraculous that absolutely no one can deny it, it'll disappear into the ether.

This part at the end was also amusing:

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.

That's because mutations don't cause cancer, and so-called "oncogenes" are so rare that they have almost nothing to do with most cancers. The NIH has, so far, pissed away three decades and tens of billions of dollars on a failed paradigm, with very little sign of slowing down, although they're slowly starting to admit that maybe, just maybe, there's something to the aneuploidy theory. It's the nature of that particular beast not to change course if it can possibly avoid it.

Go ahead and quote this back at me in a year.

By the way, capsaicin kills cancer cells too. All of the above goes.

For goodness sakes, look how long it took them just to acknowledge that you can cure most ulcers with antibiotics, and how long and vociferously they argued against even funding studies on the matter. And there was nowhere near as much money to be made on ulcer drugs.

As predicted, cancer patients are trying like hell to get DCA before they die.

PARIS (AFP) - People dying of cancer are turning to the Internet in a frantic attempt to buy under-the-counter versions of an untested, unlicensed tumour-shrinking chemical, science journals reported Wednesday.
...
Doctors are also being urged by patients to request special authorisation from national regulatory agencies so that they can prescribe the drug.

"At first, (people enquiring) were quite honest," researcher Evangelos Michelakis told the British science weekly. "But now we're getting emails from people asking for dosage information for, say, a 150-pound (70-kilo) golden retriever."

This is the problem with an industry in which people's lives are at stake but the gatekeepers are not only heavily cartelized but insulated from cost decisions: nothing gets done cheaply or quickly.

Because DCA has been around for years, its structure cannot be patented and pharmaceutical companies are not interested in developing the drug.

You don't say.

Michelakis is raising money with the hope of starting his own small-scale clinical trial "within the next few months," Nature said.

Months? Before it even begins? That's insane. A reasonable, humane system would allow people who are dying anyway to try the drug immediately, and someone could record the results afterward.

Just despicable.

The government research-industrial establishment always acts to defend itself and to preserve the status quo, just like any big government or big corporate entity will.

Science has become horribly corrupted by this dysfuncitional system. What's the excuse that the corporate and government bureaucrats who call themselves "scientists" will use for this? Oh, right, we can only allow authorized people with millions of dollars of funding and decades of research experience to experiment with drugs that could potentially save dying people. We need tens of millions of dollars and years and years of careful research before maybe we'll let dying people with no hope at all access to things like this.

Pathetic.