Pollywogs!

Read about it last week on Reddit, then read it again somewhere else today and thought “Why didn’t I blog about that last time?”…

Dichloroacetate (DCA), as a cheap, safe and effective cancer fighting drug

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.

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).

Now if that isn’t amazing, fortuitous and inspiring, I don’t know what is. You would thing ONE major pharmaceutical company would RUN LIKE THE FUCKING WIND with this, if ONLY for the amazing ‘we aren’t just a money grubbing ultra-rich bunch of Corporate Cocksuckers™’ factor…when you are a fabulously affluent corporation, you sorta have that Corporate Cocksucker™ deeply ingrained I guess. Imagine if you could say ‘We decided this was the right thing to do, to lose a couple billion on making this drug as wide spread and as attainable as possible for the most people world wide: we WANT to fight cancer, simply because we can and simply because it is the right thing to do.’ Bill and Melinda Gates won’t be doing this, although we can always hope…I can hope some amazingly rich and profitable corporation or individual will let the heady rush of saviour take over and carry them into doing a Good Thing with their money…regardless of the potential for profits involved in this cancer treatement or that cancer treatement, shouldn’t those with the power and ability simply do a Good Thing because they can? Simply pricing a treatment which isn’t going to generate billions as a loss leader is a boon to humanity that builds good will and an image as a corporation who actually thinks of people as something other than a source of dollar bills…

In an effort to be fair and balanced, an interesting examination of the situaiton. If worst comes to worst and it is only mildly effective in, say, 50% of cancer cases, it is probably still an excellent new tool to add to chemotherapy. So, perhaps someone will patent this new and novel use, bring it to market, and end up charging $75 a dose…you know, ‘the usual’.