The Great "Eureka!" Moment in Cancer Research?

Cancer research has necessarily moved out of the periphery and into a more central role in my attention budget lately. So, I was fascinated to find the following article in The New Scientist today: Cheap 'safe' drug kills most cancers:

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.

An Open Source miracle, cancer killing drug?! It IS too good to be true!

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.

Michelakis suggests that the switch to glycolysis as an energy source occurs when cells in the middle of an abnormal but benign lump don’t get enough oxygen for their mitochondria to work properly (see diagram). In order to survive, they switch off their mitochondria and start producing energy through glycolysis.

Crucially, though, mitochondria do another job in cells: they activate apoptosis, the process by which abnormal cells self-destruct. When cells switch mitochondria off, they become “immortal”, outliving other cells in the tumour and so becoming dominant. Once reawakened by DCA, mitochondria reactivate apoptosis and order the abnormal cells to die.

“The results are intriguing because they point to a critical role that mitochondria play:

they impart a unique trait to cancer cells that can be exploited for cancer therapy,” says Dario Altieri, director of the University of Massachusetts Cancer Center in Worcester.

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. The pay-off is that if DCA does work, it will be easy to manufacture and dirt cheap.

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. “The question is: which comes first?” he says.

Here's a funny thing. This evening Liam asked me what cancer was and I told him that cancer was when cells got confused about what role they were supposed to be playing in the body and then they run wild causing all kinds of harm to the body and sometimes death. He thought about it and asked, "Will I get cancer?" In a typical parental move to head off any childish worries I said, "No."

"Why not."

"Because in a few years scientists will have discovered how to make the bad cells not take over the body, and basically they will have cured cancer," was my pat response. Appeals to future cure-all tech are a pretty staple part of soothing kids fretfulness about these sorts of things in our house.

But I really had no idea that we might be curing cancer, like right now. Amazing. Long way to go yet though. If you are interested in following the trials or donating to help the trials begin, follow the link at the beginning of the article to the U. of Alberta and Alberta Cancer Board.

Update: 2.22.07, 0730: Dr. Len of the National Cancer Institute wieghs in with a bit more detail, and with the right amount of caution.