11: Several websites are reporting that last week ‘cancer was cured without anyone reporting on it’. This is not true and seems, we think, to have arisen from a misreading of the date on the most recent paper on DCA (which was published on May 12th 2010 – i.e. this time last year).
Everything we wrote in the post and comments below stands – DCA is still only a ‘potential’ cancer treatment, and more research is needed to find out whether it’s safer or more effective than existing therapies.
- Henry
DCA has been tested in a small trial
The controversial drug DCA (dichloroacetate) is in the headlines again, after researchers in Canada carried out a small-scale clinical trial of the drug in five patients with advanced brain tumours.
Over the past year or two there have been several articles in the news and on the internet about DCA, which was claimed to be cheap, safe and “kill most cancers”.
Understandably this caused a great deal of interest, especially as DCA is an off-patent drug and appears to be non-toxic to humans (although it can cause significant side effects, as we’ll see later).
But before we jump to conclusions and hail DCA as a ‘wonder drug’, we need to look at the science behind the headlines.
What is DCA and how does it work?
Mitochondria are the 'power stations' in our cells
All our cells need energy to grow and function, including cancer cells. Simply put, our cells usually generate energy by breaking down sugar (glucose). To do this, they use a process known as the Krebs cycle, which takes place in tiny structures within the cell called mitochondria (the ‘power stations’ of the cell).
But cancer cells bypass this cycle and produce energy using a simpler process, known as glycolysis, which takes place outside the mitochondria in the cell’s cytoplasm (the main part of the cell).
Mitochondria play a crucial role in cells. As well as generating energy for the cell, they can also trigger the cell to die if it is faulty – a process that helps stop cancers from forming in the first place. Because cancer cells seem to switch off their mitochondria, scientists think this is one way in which cancer cells are able to evade death and remain immortal.
DCA, or dichloroacetate, is a very simple chemical and is similar to some of the chemicals involved in the Krebs cycle. In 2007, researchers at the University of Alberta (led by Evangelos Michelakis) found that adding DCA to cancer cells grown in the lab kick-starts the Krebs cycle, turning the mitochondria back on again. This caused the cancer cells to stop multiplying and die. The team discovered that DCA didn’t affect healthy cells, because their mitochondria were functioning normally.
DCA has been tested as a treatment for children and adults with certain rare metabolic disorders. This means that, at the doses needed to treat these diseases at least, DCA has been through clinical trials aimed at assessing its safety. Based on their results, the researchers have proposed that DCA could also be useful in treating cancer.
To begin to investigate if this is indeed the case, Michelakis and his team started by carrying out experiments on cancer cells grown in the lab. The team also studied rats that had been injected with cancer cells. They found that DCA could slow the growth of the rats’ tumours, and reduce their size. This did not prove that the cancers were completely cured, or that DCA could prevent cancers from growing.
It is important to stress that DCA had not then been tested as a cancer treatment in humans, despite the implication in news headlines that it “kills most cancers”. There are many research papers produced by scientists around the world every year that reveal potential new treatments for cancer. But it is important that every discovery is carefully investigated to make sure that it is effective and safe for use in patients, and DCA is no exception.
The University of Alberta researchers received approval for a human cancer trial in September 2007, involving 50 patients. Now they have published the first results from five of those patients in the journal Science Translational Medicine.