Canadian Scientists Cure Cancer... No One Notices?

[uc.asc]

...this thread needs a function to prevent retards who believe sensationalist bullshit they read on the internet from opening their mouths before they read any comments.

 

[mrF00bar]

OP: You really don't see how little these companies care if you are asking that question.

 

[TehRandom1]

Good news everyone!

Although the original story is about 4 years old, a quick check in a journal database (EMBASE and Medline via Ovid) did yield some good results. I restricted the search to articles less than a year old, and there are papers coming out which are looking at the effects of DCA.

Generally, it seems DCA will work with current anti-cancer drugs to kill off more cancer cells at least, so this is not a dead end, and people are still looking into it.

Secondly, I'm not at all suprised about the major drug companies overlooking this. For a drug to be licensed for sale in a modernised country, they need to be proven to be effective in treatment, which means long and expensive trials need to be carried out. This cost is ususally offset by getting a patent to the drug, as it allows them to make truckloads of cash during this time.

In this case, DCA is not able to be patentable, what would happen is as soon as the drug is licenced for use, other companies don't need to carry out long trials, they only need to prove 'bioequvalence', which is much cheaper and quicker. Therefore, there is no economic benefit for a drug company to invest resources for DCA.

 

[Togs]

...this thread needs a function to prevent retards who believe sensationalist bullshit they read on the internet from opening their mouths before they read any comments.

Agreed, always annoys me how the general population has such a flawed understanding of science.

Cheers for the paper btw, and if you dont mind me asking whats your training?

 

[Bakuryukun]

oh for pete's sake, I keep seeing this everywhere. First off this is REALLY old, and secondly pharmaceutical companies didn't decline this for NO reason it simply asked that more repeat testing be done to verify the claims put forward, does anybody REALLY think "curing cancer" would be so simple as a single medication? If you do you obviously have NO idea about how cancer works or where it comes from so stop thinking your opinion is worth even a little on the subject.

‎"No conclusions can be made on whether the drug is safe or effective in patients with this form of brain cancer, due to the limited number of patients tested by the study's leads Drs Michelakis and Petruk. Researchers emphasize that use of DCA by patients or physicians, supplied from for-profit sources or without close clinical observation by experienced medical teams in the setting of research trials, is not only inappropriate but may also be dangerous."

Source: http://www.dca.med.ualberta.ca/Home/Updates/2010-05-12_Update.cfm

Furthermore, the tests were only done on those with glioblastoma (brain tumors), and in *some* patients, it stopped the growth, at best this is a untested treatment. But it is no cure, and pharmaceutical aren't hiding a cure from us.

Dear general populous: stop being gullible people who believe the first thing you hear, so long as it's either very nice (Cancer is cured) or really bad (EVIL PHARMACEUTICAL CORPORATIONS)

 

[uc.asc]

...this thread needs a function to prevent retards who believe sensationalist bullshit they read on the internet from opening their mouths before they read any comments.

Agreed, always annoys me how the general population has such a flawed understanding of science.

Cheers for the paper btw, and if you dont mind me asking whats your training?

None that's meaningful. I do medical transcription for facilities including an oncology clinic, so I have a passing familiarity with oncology terminology and cancer treatment, and sometimes look things up.

...and I know that there's such thing as glycolysis. It's great that so many people people know mitochondria aren't cells, but I'm about to develop nervous a tic over here

 

[Zaik]

Hi, I'm Dr. Zaik M.D. PhD QED esq., and the comments on that article were hilarious.

It's apparently a terrible summary of this article: http://www.dca.med.ualberta.ca/Home/Updates/2010-05-12_Update.cfm .

That one looks a bit more legit.

 

[Thy-Art-Is-Awesome]

People, please, stop acting like you know Biology, because half of you don't know two craps of what is written there...

This paper have been proved as fact by the community and many third party supporters are angry about this fact.

But...but mitochondria are cellular structures. Yes, people speculate that they were once a type of bacteria, but that doesn't change the fact that they are now thought of as an energy-producing organelle found in animal cells, that are responsible for cellular respiration.

The lysosome is the organelle responsible for cell death, meaning that cell death is not happening because of cancer infected cells cannot lyse.

 

[Da Chi]

This makes me think of Jonas Salk. Many of you will not know his name, but you are being affected by him at this very moment. It's because he invented the Polio vaccine, and never sold it for a penny.
Jonas Salk made the Polio Vaccine and refused to patent it. He wanted the vaccine to be used freely and without profit. He wanted every child to grow up and never have to endure Polio. So without profit and without gain, Jonas Salk made the world a wholly better place.

We can do this too. I I've seen people who have polio. People who suffer from the condition and I know that it is all but eradicated from this earth because of selfless individuals.
If this truly is a cure, and it truly can end various types of Cancer, I have no doubt in my mind that we will see people give up everything just so no one else has to suffer. Because, let's face it, we wish we could all be as selfless as Jonah Salk.

 

[Doug]

Okay, my BS monitors are going off here. Mitochondria are a structure within the cell, not a type of cell. Further, they're essentially the powerplant of the cell; if cancer patients had non-functioning mitochondria, they'd be dead long before the cancer did anything. I'm going to have to see a more reliable source on this before I believe anything.

Quite so - I suspect bad reporting and that the journalist/reporter badly understood what was being said to him.

 

[Yossarian1507]

And people wonder why I rail on about what a sick fucked up system privatized healthcare is. In a socialized healthcare system, where people come ahead of money, we'd have jumped all over this. Too bad we'd rather make money by holding people's own lives hostage until they fork up the dough for a treatment.

The grass is always greener on the other side, it seems. I have a socialized healthcare system in Poland, and here's how it works here:

- You feel sick.
- The very next day, you HAVE TO go to your doctor at 6 A.M. Why? Because the registrations for the visits starts at 7 A.M and unless you go there an hour earlier, then you'll have to wait in a giant line. The funniest part? The registrations are closed at 8 A.M so if you won't make it - tough luck, go be sick somewhere else, and see you tomorrow. And no, you cannot register yourself using the phone.
- Okay, you made it. You managed to get a number. You visit the internist. He tells you it looks like blahblahblah. And you better hope that blahblahblah needs to be killed by some medicine bought at the chemist shop, so your torment ends here. If not, you'll have to visit...
- The specialist, like the laryngologist or whatever. The hard part? Oh this guy is busy... Let's see the calendar to see, when there's a nearest date when you can visit him. Huh, that's 3 weeks from now at completely random hour. It's a really late date? Who cares, there's nothing you can do. The hour collides with something very important you have to do that day? Too bad, you can always pick even LATER date.
- Wait three weeks, and either get better during that time, so the doctor can scold you for wasting his time, or get worse, so the treatment will be longer and less pleasant.

And that's how it goes. Don't even get me started about hospitals, because I have only cusses to say about my few visits in there. We even have a saying: "You have to be really healthy, if you want to be sick in Poland."

Of course, alternatively, you can go to some private clinic, pay up and get diagnosed/cured ASAP. So yeah, I PRAY EVERYDAY for a privatized healthcare.

 

[Jonluw]

Okay, my BS monitors are going off here. Mitochondria are a structure within the cell, not a type of cell. Further, they're essentially the powerplant of the cell; if cancer patients had non-functioning mitochondria, they'd be dead long before the cancer did anything. I'm going to have to see a more reliable source on this before I believe anything.

My thoughts exactly.

Although, if it does happen to be real: Yay capitalism, I guess.

 

[SenseOfTumour]

My feeling is, and I say feeling as I don't pretend to fully understand all of it, not being a biology expert, that sure, maybe it's not the complete, absolute cure to all cancers ever, but even if it's a step in the right direction, it surely doesn't deserve derision.

Hell even if it can replace chemo in some forms of cancer as a treatment, that's a great step forward for many people, and medical science.

I remember a conspiracy theory that AIDS and cancer had already been cured, but that the cure was cheap and simple to replicate using common household ingredients, so it was being kept secret until the major pharm companies had found a way to disguise the formula in a complex compound that couldn't be easily copied and could be copyrighted.

Now, it's a daft conspiracy theory, and I'm sure that hasn't happened, at the same time, it wouldn't remotely surprise me if it did happen.

 

[SeaCalMaster]

If this was genuine there would have been a HUGE media response. Even if Big Pharma doesn't want anything to do with it, a cure for cancer is going to be beyond newsworthy. Besides, Big Pharma would have interest in it. People won't stop smoking. Smoking gives you lung cancer. A cure for lung cancer, therefore, would be financially viable.

people they'd better argue against being looked after more cheaply, but that's for another thread.)

I'm against it not because I don't think we should have free health care, but because I know my government can't do a damn thing right. They won't fund the program properly, they won't make it even remotely easy to take advantage of, they'll fill it with red tape, and they'll use it as an excuse to boost taxes 9001% higher than necessary to offset the costs. Give me a government that can do something right and I'd be fine with it, but with what we've got to put up with, keep it far away.

Yep. Government is not a solution to the problem; it is the problem. Just like a gramme is better than a damn.

 

[EradiusLore]

Apparently there is a viable, easy method to cure cancer that has been repeatedly tested and confirmed by Canadian scientists in Edmonton, Alberta but no companies have taken the product up because it can't be patented and is therefore unprofitable.

Canadian researchers find a simple cure for cancer, but major pharmaceutical companies are not interested.

Researchers at the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, Canada have cured cancer last week, yet there is a little ripple in the news or in TV. It is a simple technique using very basic drug. The method employs dichloroacetate, which is currently used to treat metabolic disorders. So, there is no concern of side effects or about their long term effects.


This drug doesn?t require a patent, so anyone can employ it widely and cheaply compared to the costly cancer drugs produced by major pharmaceutical companies.


Canadian scientists tested this dichloroacetate (DCA) on human?s cells; it killed lung, breast and brain cancer cells and left the healthy cells alone. It was tested on Rats inflicted with severe tumors; their cells shrank when they were fed with water supplemented with DCA. The drug is widely available and the technique is easy to use, why the major drug companies are not involved? Or the Media interested in this find?


In human bodies there is a natural cancer fighting human cell, the mitochondria, but they need to be triggered to be effective. Scientists used to think that these mitochondria cells were damaged and thus ineffective against cancer. So they used to focus on glycolysis, which is less effective in curing cancer and more wasteful. The drug manufacturers focused on this glycolysis method to fight cancer. This DCA on the other hand doesn?t rely on glycolysis instead on mitochondria; it triggers the mitochondria which in turn fights the cancer cells.


The side effect of this is it also reactivates a process called apoptosis. You see, mitochondria contain an all-too-important self-destruct button that can't be pressed in cancer cells. Without it, tumors grow larger as cells refuse to be extinguished. Fully functioning mitochondria, thanks to DCA, can once again die.


With glycolysis turned off, the body produces less lactic acid, so the bad tissue around cancer cells doesn't break down and seed new tumors.


Pharmaceutical companies are not investing in this research because DCA method cannot be patented, without a patent they can?t make money, like they are doing now with their AIDS Patent. Since the pharmaceutical companies won?t develop this, the article says other independent laboratories should start producing this drug and do more research to confirm all the above findings and produce drugs. All the groundwork can be done in collaboration with the Universities, who will be glad to assist in such research and can develop an effective drug for curing cancer.


You can access the original research for this cancer here.


This article wants to raise awareness for this study, hope some independent companies and small startup will pick up this idea and produce these drugs, because the big companies won?t touch it for a long time.

http://hubpages.com/hub/Scientists_cure_cancer__but_no_one_takes_notice

Thoughts?

Edit: Also I'm aware this article is a few years old but it doesn't change the fact that no one has picked it up.

all i can say is what a bunch of f***ing bastards! money is really more important to these people then the life of fellow human beings!? this is such an amazing discovery and the people behind it deserve recognition

 

[uc.asc]

And people wonder why I rail on about what a sick fucked up system privatized healthcare is. In a socialized healthcare system, where people come ahead of money, we'd have jumped all over this. Too bad we'd rather make money by holding people's own lives hostage until they fork up the dough for a treatment.

The grass is always greener on the other side, it seems. I have a socialized healthcare system in Poland, and here's how it works here:

- You feel sick.
- The very next day, you HAVE TO go to your doctor at 6 A.M. Why? Because the registrations for the visits starts at 7 A.M and unless you go there an hour earlier, then you'll have to wait in a giant line. The funniest part? The registrations are closed at 8 A.M so if you won't make it - tough luck, go be sick somewhere else, and see you tomorrow. And no, you cannot register yourself using the phone.
- Okay, you made it. You managed to get a number. You visit the internist. He tells you it looks like blahblahblah. And you better hope that blahblahblah needs to be killed by some medicine bought at the chemist shop, so your torment ends here. If not, you'll have to visit...
- The specialist, like the laryngologist or whatever. The hard part? Oh this guy is busy... Let's see the calendar to see, when there's a nearest date when you can visit him. Huh, that's 3 weeks from now at completely random hour. It's a really late date? Who cares, there's nothing you can do. The hour collides with something very important you have to do that day? Too bad, you can always pick even LATER date.
- Wait three weeks, and either get better during that time, so the doctor can scold you for wasting his time, or get worse, so the treatment will be longer and less pleasant.

And that's how it goes. Don't even get me started about hospitals, because I have only cusses to say about my few visits in there. We even have a saying: "You have to be really healthy, if you want to be sick in Poland."

Of course, alternatively, you can go to some private clinic, pay up and get diagnosed/cured ASAP. So yeah, I PRAY EVERYDAY for a privatized healthcare.

http://cdn-www.i-am-bored.com/media/ushealthcarereforminfo.jpg

That sounds unpleasant, and it looks like poland's health care system is very under-funded. In terms of long-term outcomes, though, we can see that nearly all countries with socialized health care deliver better long-term outcomes (life expectancy) than the US, at a fraction of the cost.

I can walk into a clinic and walk out with a prescription 15 minutes later (total cost without insurance: $180), but if I were ever to come down with a serious illness I would be financially ruined. Hospital bills for some things can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

I would prefer frustration and security, over convenience with a chance of your life being ruined. I might not pick poland over the US, but certainly most other european countries.

 

[phantasmalWordsmith]

Well, the Canadians invented zippers, they got expertise. They just cured cancer, they combat disease.