Cheap, Safe, Patentless Cancer Drug Discovered

PyroMosh writes "The New Scientist is reporting that researchers working at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada have discovered that an existing drug called dichloroacetate (DCA) is effective in killing cancer cells, while leaving the host's healthy cells unharmed. DCA has already been used for years to treat metabolic disorders, and is known to be fairly safe. Sounds like great news, is it too good to be true? Why is the mainstream news media failing to report on this potential breakthrough? The University of Alberta and the Alberta Cancer Board have set up a site with more info, where you can also donate to support future clinical trials."

Comments

Patentless?

[iluvcapra]

Open Source Medicine?

How would you write the GPL of pharmacopeia?

Re:Patentless?

[pngwen]

The problem I have with your attitude is simple. Doctors spend long hours and lots of time schooling, followed by a period in which they work extremely long hours for next to nothing. That much is certain. What about Engineers and Programmers? We go through the same crap, but we don't make near as much as you do. What is it that makes you feel your time is worth $800.00 an hour? (I arrived at this figure by timing how long my physician spends with me vs. how much I pay them.) The reason is simple. People would die without your help. What you are doing is nothing more than taking advantage of sick people, milking them for all they are worth. It is tantamount to extortion, except you use illness instead of violence.

You think you're the only type of business that has overhead? Virtually every business pays an office staff, has to be insured, needs a building, etc. Why don't they charge outrageous fees? It comes back to the arrogant sense of entitlement that you exhibit. My plumber is more professional and friendly than any doctor I have ever seen. He comes to my home, does his job and courteously thanks me. He charges less than my doctor. If he can do it, why can't you?

I will never trust you. You are a doctor. It is in your best interest to keep me just well enough to survive, but sick enough to keep returning. You are exceptionally greedy, and you wouldn't hesitate to prolong, rather than cure, any illness. I will only go to doctors if I need to, and I will second guess EVERYTHING you say. It is for the best, because you wouldn't hesitate to kill me by making me take medications that are dangerous, but which you get kickbacks for prescribing.

Re:Patentless?

[Tinfoil]

My father in law in a truck driver and apparently they've put new rules into place that state that for every 13 days of driving you have to take 6 or 7 days off now. He's a long-haul driver for Scheider, on the 2 week on 1 week off rotation for the past few years.

Re:Patentless?

[Fordiman]

"1) There's nothing wrong with becoming a doctor to make money"

I disagree. There's everything wrong with becoming a doctor to make money. Without the passion for helping people, the training means nothing; like any profession, you have to give a damn about what you're working on. I'm not saying you shouldn't get into medicine without the expectation of making money; it's a profession, you have to expect returns on it. I'm just saying that the AMOUNT of money you make is peripheral to a good doctor: It should be enough to live comfortably; anything less is unfair, anything more makes his services prohibitively expensive.

Of course, below the surface, I'm agreeing with you, it's just that I'm picking nits. A good doctor performs a valuable service, and as a result should be compensated justly for it. The nit that I'm picking is that 'doing it for the money' implies that in this theoretical doctor's mind, the money is paramount. The second I sense that sort of thinking in a doctor, I no longer trust him; I feel that suddenly, a little green bit of paper takes precedence over my health.

After all, I've seen the same thing happen in IT; a tech fixes your computer *just enough* that it works today, but some strange fault *will* happen in the next week, so that you go calling the tech again, getting him a new fee. With money as primary motivator, a doctor is likely to do the same thing.

Of course, I never ever trust other people to be good; I only trust them to follow their motivations. If I believe a doctor is motivated by a passion to help people, I trust him.

Additionally, I never trust a doctor that uses the excuse of unreasonably high insurance as an excuse to gouge his customers; a doctor is charged high insurance for either being too 'inexperienced' (in which case he should still be working at a hospital), or having a propensity for lawsuits (in which case trust, while not explicitly undeserved, is questionable).

I do have a certain trust in hospitals; with enough MDs watching each others backs, I'm almost certain they're not going to accidentally kill me. Yes I watch Scrubs. No, that doesn't scare me, nor does it reflect on my opinions of the real world of medicine.

Notes: 'him' is used as a convenient placeholder only because writing 'him/her' everywhere seems ... annoying. This would be well solved by a singular form of gender-neutral personal pronoun, which doesn't exist in the English language, as far as I know. My own physician is female, has her own practice, is quite good at the job, and has what I believe to be reasonable prices.

Re:Patentless?

[eli pabst]

Many tens of thousands of these mistakes result in someone dying. Hundreds of thousands result in serious harm. Please don't imply that doctors have higher standards than plumbers.

I wasn't trying to imply it at all. In fact I'll flat out say that doctors do have higher standards than plumbers (and virtually most other professions). They have to, in order to minimize errors. Which is why even the most minuscule thing must be documented, the words they use when writing orders/notes are extensively analyzed and standardized to prevent errors (many hospitals have regulations against use the greek letter mu when writing ul (microliter) because it easier to confuse with ml. People have actually done studies on that kind of thing. How many plumbers do you know that spend hours after work writing extensive notes on the jobs they did during the day. However, I'm certainly not saying doctors are perfect. They put a lot of effort into trying to be, but they're still human like the rest of us.

 

It's a more difficult job, but plumbing mistakes are pretty rare in comparison to medical mistakes.

I'd like to see some kind of reference for that. I've had some plumber screw things up pretty bad more than once.

 

I've had doctors force antibiotics on me for a cold, withhold pain medication with a back injury, suggest expensive and meaningless tests, and so forth.

Note that prescibing antibiotics for colds is largely a results of patients *demanding* they be given something. They don't want to be told "sorry, there's nothing I can really do for that" and family practice docs will often lose patients if they don't.

I realize that everyones experience is different. I can walk today because some guy who used to be an english teacher decided to go into medicine and become a neurosurgeon because he thought he could better help people. He put a shattered vertebrae in my spine back together in an 8 hour procedure and then went in saw patients afterwards. Probably put in a 12-15 hour day.

Re:Patentless?

[drinkypoo]

I wish others here could understand that soldiers are not politics. I wish they could appreciate the sacrifice that people make when they join the military and take on that style of life. Thank you for your service.

Everything has political repercussions. There is no stance that is not political. Even refusing to be political is itself a political stance.

Joining the military any way but through the draft is a choice. It's a choice that a person makes. I do not cause them to choose this. I do not owe them anything.

When people join the military in peacetime they are making it possible for the military to be used. A nation with a strong military will in pretty much every case find excuses to throw that weight around. No country does this more today than the USA. We are able to do it because we have a strong standing military and the finest technology of any fighting force, although Iran has been kicking some ass lately and our buddies in Israel have always been very proactive about developing technology.

So no, I don't get all choked up when someone tells me they were out there protecting me. Unless you were fighting in one of the actual wars for freedom (like say, against the axis of eeeevil) or some action that we never heard about that is really about saving people and not just about killing or assasinating, what you were really doing was helping to build the American hegemony.

Re:Patentless?

[radtea]

Where did you do your residency? ;)

Caltech. Only we call it a post-doc.

I used to work in medical physics (after a relatively short 13 years of undergrad, graduate school, and post-doc'ing in pure physics) and it was very clear that MD's had it made financially over PhD's, despite the fact that we had at least as much opportunity to kill people with our mistakes.

MD's are highly paid for exactly one reason. As Adam Smith once said, "Never do two or three men of the same trade sit down together over a pint of ale that it does not end up in a general conspiracy against the rest of mankind." Or words to that effect.

Much of what MD's do could be done by various forms of paramedic and nurse-practitioner. But the legal lock on "one certification to rule them all" has kept MD's in a safe, competition-free bubble for the better part of a century, and no-where moreso than in the U.S.

Even this announcement is a little late...

[Dieppe]

If anyone was paying attention this is a few months after the previous mention of it.

And the reason it won't get any funding to study whether or not it's a real cure for cancer is because there's no money in it! If it's a cheap solution and it magically cures cancer... where's the profit in that?

So people will continue to die from cancer, who could have been cured by this cheap drug, because it would offset the bottom line. Nice world we life in, huh? Up next: Other things about this world you didn't know! Wal*Mart sells toys made by third-world children in order to sell them cheap in the United States!

Not what it seems

[Raindance]

DCA kills many sorts of cancer in mice. This is a good sign. It's based on something found naturally in food and is already used safely in humans. That's also good.

But many, many things kill cancer in mice but don't in humans-- mice have significantly different molecular machinery than we do re: cancer prevention (just look at the cancer rates of control lab rats!). This is promising, but it's no breakthrough until it proves itself in humans.

I feel there's a lot of politicking going on behind the scenes on this issue.

STOP TROLLING

[Anonymous Coward]

at the required dose it actually causes the user to enter a state of euphoria
followed by long periods of incontinance.

Please, not another breakthrough

[jenik]

Not only is this story a dupe but having read the paper in Cancer Cell I'm nowhere near that optimistic. Yes, they show death of cancer cells both in vitro and in vivo but the proposed mechanism of action (re-activation of mitochondrial metabolism leading to increased free radical production and apoptosis) is debatable to say the least. Moreover, even though DCA is registered for treatment of congenital lactate acidosis, it has quite a few unpleasant side effects so it's definitely not a silver bullet. The paper is not clear on how they came to interpretations they present as some of the data could easily be interpreted in other ways. Although the concept of targeting mitochondria to treat cancer is very interesting, as usual, beware of breakthroughs in medical sciences - they often aren't. jan

Re:Please, not another breakthrough

[prefect42]

Read the next issue of New Scientist, and the reader letters includes a piece that notes that it's rather early to be suggesting that this drug is a wonder drug, including the fact that it's known to cause cancer as a side effect (in much lower doses than would be needed to treat a cancer). Not that that's necessarily a killer.

Canadian Health Care System

[mrSnowman]

I bet the public Canadian Health Care System would foot the bill to produce this drug. If you had a universal health care system in your country eradicating cancer cheaply would definately reduce the money the government would pay for overall health care costs.

Keeping all the people who would have died of cancer in your economy would also keep it nice and healthy.

DCA is not safe (neurotoxicity)

[waterbear]

DCA is not in any medical formulary that I have seen. The prospects of it being accepted as safe and efficacious for anything look rather thin, in view of the neurotoxicity seen in a recently reported clinical trial for a different possible medical indication ----

see "Dichloroacetate causes toxic neuropathy in MELAS, A randomized, controlled clinical trial "
P. Kaufmann, MD, MSc, et al, NEUROLOGY 2006;66:324-330
[see http://www.neurology.org/cgi/content/abstract/66/3 /324 ]

[excerpts:-]

"Objective: To evaluate the efficacy of dichloroacetate (DCA) in the treatment of mitochondrial myopathy, encephalopathy, lactic acidosis and stroke-like episodes (MELAS)."

[...snip...]

"Conclusion: DCA at 25 mg/kg/day is associated with peripheral nerve toxicity resulting in a high rate of medication discontinuation and early study termination. Under these experimental conditions, the authors were unable to detect any beneficial effect. The findings show that DCA-associated neuropathy overshadows the assessment of any potential benefit in MELAS."

It seems that the researchers at Alberta have not put DCA into any patients yet, and so we can't know how the effective human dose (if there even is one) for discouraging the growth of cancer cells relates to the toxic doses (which unfortunately do exist) seen in the reported clinical trial for another potential medical indication.

This begins to smell to me of hype.

-wb-

Re:Patentless

[tomstdenis]

Contrary to popular belief, many of us dont get that warm and fuzzy feeling for helping people with no return expected.

I pity thee.

While not religious myself I do believe in the vague notion of karma (I say vague as not to insult the religious as I only really take the superficial qualities of it).

While I'm all for having money to buy toys and what not, helping people for no other reason than they need the help and I can provide it, is often more than enough reason for me to move to action. And you know what, usually down the road it pays off.

and there is even more...

[gd23ka]

Many infected with AIDS prefer the virus than the
slow death inflicted by what is at best a palliative
drug but you're certainly right here.

I personally however doubt they would take the same
approach on DCA and give someone a monopoly on DCA,
as DCA saves lives. That however is not their concern.

Here's another one... take "TeenScreen" for an example,
the Bush backed at school mental illness screening programs
they've set up. Kids are asked to fill out a questionaire
developed by pharma usually without parental knowledge or
consent and if they check the "wrong" answers they're
prescribed medication.

Re:Socialized medicine

[Daengbo]

I know very little about this debate. The only thing I DO KNOW is that Vancouverites came down to Seattle all the time (while I was living there 1997-1999) just to get surgeries that put them on an overly long waiting list. They were willing to travel and shell out their own money to have the surgeries done in the U.S. That never spoke well to me for the system in Canada.

This time it ain't the drug companies...

[pointbeing]

If this treatment or some other new treatment did in fact cure many cancers inexpensively, it would be a nightmare come true for the chemotherapy industry. How big is that industry, something like $40 billion a year? Wow...

The vast majority of chemotherapy costs are *not* drug costs.

Case in point: My spousal unit has Stage IV breast cancer and has had for almost eight years. She's currently on her sixth course (not round, course) of chemotherapy and is doing pretty well, thankyouverymuch ;-)

Let's talk about drug costs. Doxorubicin (trade name Adriamycin) is generally accepted first line chemotherapy for breast cancer in combination with another drug, Cytoxan. In some parts of the world they use Epirubicin instead, but I digress.

Wholesale drug cost for a single dose of Adriamycin is about $300. Considering the drug is toxic as hell and requires special handling and disposal protocol at the manufacturer level that seems reasonable. Cost to administer? Seven thousand bucks - I can show you the bill. Since it's administered as an IV push over a couple hours it takes a little more work than other drugs but in a healthcare system that charges $180 to start an IV (doesn't matter that the spousal unit has a mediport in her chest) or $40 for a liter of normal saline for that IV it's not difficult to see where the markup is.

Don't get me wrong, I have no real love for drug companies - the two most widely prescribed post-chemotherapy antinausea meds are Zofran and Kytril. Zoftan has an average wholesale price (AWP) of $26.25 _per_tablet_. Kytril is even better, at $59.67 per pill. They normally give you Kytril if Zofran doesn't work. You pay or you puke for a couple days - your choice.

The drug that's keeping the spousal unit alive right now is called Herceptin and costs about $48k per year. Reasonably new monoclonal antibody made from the ovaries of Chinese hamsters. Guess $1000 per dose is reasonable since you probably gotta grind up a lot of hamsters to get enough to be useful.

But again, it costs much more to give the IV than the drug costs.

I got sued by our local cancer center because my insurance company decided to play games one month. Since the patient is responsible for medical charges in order for the hospital to collect they have to sue you and name the insurance company as a codefendant. One month of treatment - which included two rounds of chemotherapy, two 15 minute doctor visits, probably eight blood tests and ten days worth of a drug called Neupogen they used to give you to stimulate white blood count?

Glad you asked. $39,000. Thirty Nine Thousand Dollars for one month's treatment. Drug costs? Less than 20% of that. Fortunately it only cost me $150 to a friend who's an attorney to write a letter to the insurance company to make it all go away.

One more and then I'll STFU. I hate insurance companies too, even though the spousal unit would probably be dead without them. The aforementioned Neupogen? They give it to stimulate white blood cell production - we decided to give it at home. Got the oncology nurses to give me a class on giving injections and even got to practice on the spousal unit. Our oncologist writes the prescription and I take it to the corner pharmacy. Pharmacy calls two days later and says prescription is in, your insurance company won't cover it and please bring in a check for $2800.

Turns out my insurance company at the time was really an insurance broker and the prescription and major medical components got in a big argument over who was gonna get to pay for this. Major medical lost - and rather than give the shot at home we had to go in for an office visit every day from day 4 through about day 10 of each treatment cycle to get the shot.

There are so many holes in the system it's tough to pinpoint any one problem, but I've rambled long enough.

cheers -

Re:Patentless

[orcrist]

But why would they? Contrary to popular belief, many of us dont get that warm and fuzzy feeling for helping people with no return expected.

Yeah, and the rest of us label people like that (you?) "leeches", or just "assholes" - people who benefit greatly from the advantages of civilization, rule of law, and a modern infrastructure, then turn around and say "That's mine!! How dare you tax me!" when asked to contribute to that. Generally, that's the sort of behavior which encourages societies to eventually entrust their governments with such tasks, despite how the human leeches cry "Oh no, Socialized Medicine!!!" or "Free market will save us, free market will save us!!!"

-chris

(heh, can't wait for the flames on this one)

Re:DCA is completely useless: it harms profits

[Anonymous Coward]

From the stacks of pens and post-its and bits and bobs that I've got on my desk from pharmaceutical companies, and the stories I've heard of people being taken out for expensive meals etc, buying people expensive reference books and tools in an attempt to curry favour, I could quite see that that's the case!

At least here in the UK they're banned from advertising prescription medication on TV and in the papers - although I guess that's why they keep leaking stories to our sensational media...

Although strictly speaking, the chap you quoted was kinda right - if it's going into marketing, it's still not net profit! And it is true that they need big money spinner drugs to cover the cost of others - I've seen several spend 5+ years in development, only to get to trials and be found to destroy patients' livers and have to be dropped.

Re:Dogma shoots the US in the foot...again

[Chemicalscum]

Wrong. Here in Canada we get better outcomes at a far lower cost than the US. There are a lot of fear mongering campaigns put out here by effective paid hacks of US corporations, that would like to come up here and make big bucks. The Canadian public knows however, that we have a better and fairer system than in the US. Yes there are problems, we continually have to fight the neo-cons that have crept into our political system (sometimes under the guise of being big-L Liberals as well our Tories or Conservatives) to keep up sufficient funding and support for the health system.

The fact is we get far better outcomes overall than the US for far less per capita expenditure. The UN ranks the health care system in the US as about equivalent in terms of outcomes to that of Cuba. They are both significantly better than poor third world countries. But they are nowhere near the high level of outcomes achieved by the western European countries, Canada, Australia, Japan etc that have universal health care.

During the cold war Americans used to joke that Russia was "a third world country with rockets". Now the joke is that the US is " a first world country with third world infant mortality".

A tad hostile in your approach but....

[JudgeFurious]

mostly I just find myself wishing I had mod points so I could mod this up. I have rosacea and my dermatologist prescribes an antibiotic for it. There's no cure and I'm told there's not going to be one because nobody is bothering to try and cure it. The response I've gotten from multiple dermatologists is that they can "manage it" which basically means that I get to take a pill every day that makes me sick to my stomach whether I take food with the medicine as recommended or not.

  I get to pay a doctor once a year to go into their office and get told "Yep, you still have it. Lets write that prescription for another years worth of puking pills and some topical crap that I get a kickback for recommending".

  If Doctors can treat it forever instead of curing it they will. I spend moments with my doctor and he charges my insurance company hundreds of dollars. It's an immense crock of shit.

You don't get a damned thing, eh?

[Grendel Drago]

Are you kidding? You get to walk down the street without old, sick, disabled people heaped up on every corner. I think that's worth a few percent of my income. As for the programs not being around long enough for you to use them, whatever problems there are with Social Security and Medicare are eminently fixable; the manufactured panic of the last few years was yet another of those boneheaded drives for privatization.

I shouldn't have to keep telling you children this

[drinkypoo]

...but "Troll" does not mean "anything with which I disagree."

I sincerely believe what I posted above. If you want to have a reasoned debate about it, I'm game. But modding me down just makes you out to be the ignorant child you are.

Now, let me address something ShadowsHawk said in response to my comment.

People join the military for all sorts of reasons, but I doubt "helping to build the American hegemony" is one of them.

That's right. People join the military to get job training, or to get money for college, or because they've been brainwashed into a military tradition by their family, or lastly and leastly, so they can serve their country. But what all of these people have in common is that, wittingly or not, they are doing just that.

Now, I would argue that any responsible adult should be able to consider the repercussions of their actions, and one of the things that results from joining the military is that it grows. I know this sounds like a very sophomoric point to actually address, but since some people (including your esteemed self) don't seem to be getting this point, I'm going to belabor it until the dead horse has been well-whipped. I can think of no other way to get the point across. When the military is larger, it is easier to apply it to various situations in which it is not warranted. For instance, http://adbusters.org/media/flash/hope_and_memory/t imeline.swf is one of my favorite little presentations on American military history. If you just glance through it you will see that the majority of American military actions were questionable to say the least. We forced Japan to trade with us by force, and of course we all know that we invaded Mexico repeatedly, and stole large portions of what is now the Estados Unidos Norteamericanos away from them, forcing them at gunpoint to sell the rest for a song. We were involved in the Opium wars. We annexed Hawaii in 1898. Especially check out Honduras in 1905; this is one of many American military conquests specifically supporting the United Fruit Company. Look carefully at Nicaragua in 1910, Cuba in 1917, Guatemala in 1954, Haiti in 1959...

The list goes on and on but what all of these things have in common is that they were financially motivated. They weren't about helping people. They were about money and power. Yes, in the same list there are conflicts that are about protecting people from bad people. There's attacks on pirates (the real kind) and their institutions. There's WWI and WWII.

Today, we are seeing much the same thing. We have bombed the shit out of a middle eastern company yet again. And yet again, the bulk of the rebuilding will be carried out by American contractors. In fact, the sole contractor overseeing and profiting from the entire thing is, guess who, Halliburton. The government claimed that they were the only contractor that could be ready "in time" and so they got the contract. Gee, I wonder why they were the only ones to meet the lengthy, detailed, and frankly unnecessary requirements so suddenly. Could they have had, you know, advance warning? Given the connection between certain high-ranking officials in our government and Halliburton, not only is that highly likely, but it is a virtual certainty.

Are you getting the message yet? There are times when the American military has done good things. Most of these were minor conflicts. A couple of them were major. In the case of the minor conflicts, a large standing military was not necessary. In the case of the major ones, the draft was utilized to bring up the numbers of people sent off to combat the menace. In neither case is a large standing military requir

Re:Dogma shoots the US in the foot...again

[Dcnjoe60]

So why would I be better off under socialized medicine?

Maybe for the same reason that you are better off with socialized highways and socialized airports and socialized fire departments, etc. Why is it that health care is the only pay as you go item that makes people through up the socialism flag?

It used to be that belonging to a society meant that we all sacrificed a little for the common good of the society. No one individual pays enough to cover the cost of the roads they travel or the cost of building an airport. Yet society benefits as a whole from having good roads and airports (and railroads, although in the US, we seem to ignore them). Why is it so hard to fathom that having basic health care provided would also not benefit all of society?

Those who could afford it would of course still go to their "private" physician, however, for the vast majority of uninsured and underinsured, they could now get health care treatment. Might it take longer than those with private insurance? Possibly, but it would be better than no treatment at all.

The government already provides some health care through various entitlement programs that are funded through taxes (or borrowing). These are usually only available to the poor and not the lower middle class. Those who fall into the uninsured and underinsured who fall through the limited government funding and require treatment for major illnesses either still get the treatment or they die. If they get the treatment, which by law, hospitals must provide, the hospitals pass the costs on to those who can pay (not directly, but through their pricing structure).

So, like it or not, we are all paying for health care via taxes and inflated medical charges already. Going to a universal health insurance plan, just makes it official and above the table. Will it cost any one individual more? Probably. Will it be a benefit to society? Definitely!

If one's goal is to avoid socialism or the appearance of it at all costs, then one better be prepared to quit using all of those government provided resources we take for granted, including roads, airports, police and fire protection, etc., etc.