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).
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