Running for the Cure - Chasing the Dangling Carrot

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn10971 [1]
"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. "

http://www.thestar.com/Health/article/171616 [2]
"Bonnet says DCA may also provide an effective cancer treatment because it is easily absorbed - ensuring it can reach areas that other drugs cannot.

Brain tumours, for example, are notoriously hard to treat with chemotherapies.

As well, because it's been used to combat other ailments - like lactic acid build-up in children and heart ischemia --Bonnet says DCA has been shown to have few toxic effects. As well, he says, its previous use in for other diseases means it can be immediately tested on human cancer patients.
Unlike other cancer drugs, DCA did not appear to have any negative effect on normal cells.
A manufactured molecule, DCA is widely available at "every chemistry store", Bonnet says. "

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-01/uoa-smo011007.php [3]
"DCA is an odourless, colourless, inexpensive, relatively non-toxic, small molecule. And researchers at the University of Alberta believe it may soon be used as an effective treatment for many forms of cancer.

Dr. Evangelos Michelakis, a professor at the U of A Department of Medicine, has shown that dichloroacetate (DCA) causes regression in several cancers, including lung, breast, and brain tumors.

...Scientists and doctors have used DCA for decades to treat children with inborn errors of metabolism due to mitochondrial diseases. Mitochondria, the energy producing units in cells, have been connected with cancer since the 1930s, when researchers first noticed that these organelles dysfunction when cancer is present.

Until recently, researchers believed that cancer-affected mitochondria are permanently damaged and that this damage is the result, not the cause, of the cancer. But Michelakis questioned this belief and began testing DCA, which activates a critical mitochondrial enzyme, as a way to "revive" cancer-affected mitochondria.

The results astounded him.

Michelakis and his colleagues found that DCA normalized the mitochondrial function in many cancers, showing that their function was actively suppressed by the cancer but was not permanently damaged by it.

More importantly, they found that the normalization of mitochondrial function resulted in a significant decrease in tumor growth both in test tubes and in animal models. Also, they noted that DCA, unlike most currently used chemotherapies, did not have any effects on normal, non-cancerous tissues.

"I think DCA can be selective for cancer because it attacks a fundamental process in cancer development that is unique to cancer cells," Michelakis said. "Cancer cells actively suppress their mitochondria, which alters their metabolism, and this appears to offer cancer cells a significant advantage in growth compared to normal cells, as well as protection from many standard chemotherapies. Because mitochondria regulate cell death--or apoptosis--cancer cells can thus achieve resistance to apoptosis, and this appears to be reversed by DCA."

...Another encouraging thing about DCA is that, being so small, it is easily absorbed in the body, and, after oral intake, it can reach areas in the body that other drugs cannot, making it possible to treat brain cancers, for example.

Also, because DCA has been used in both healthy people and sick patients with mitochondrial diseases, researchers already know that it is a relatively non-toxic molecule that can be immediately tested in patients with cancer.

Furthermore, the DCA compound is not patented and not owned by any pharmaceutical company, and, therefore, would likely be an inexpensive drug to administer, Michelakis added.

However, as DCA is not patented, Michelakis is concerned that it may be difficult to find funding from private investors to test DCA in clinical trials. He is grateful for the support he has already received from publicly funded agencies, such as the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR), and he is hopeful such support will continue and allow him to conduct clinical trials of DCA on cancer patients."

Submitted by lonewolfbunn on January 12, 2010 - 2:55am.

Running for the Cure - Still chasing the Dangling Carrot

Here is a low cost Cancer cure but it may never be used because it is unpatenable. It costs over 100 million dollars to put a drug to market. Big pharma has no interest in this cure because they cannot own exclusive rights to it.

The existance of this well researched safe cure proves that the pharmaceutical industry is not looking for a cure. They want expensive "treatments" that people must buy for the rest of their lives.

All those people who are involved in the big "running for the Cure" hype are wasting their time.
But at least they have good intentions which is more than can be said for those who collect the millions in donations.
One day "Running for the Cure" will be known as one of the biggest charity scams in history.

Submitted by ennir on January 12, 2010 - 12:15pm.

I agree, I have been annoyed ever since the cancer people stole pink, I too think the thousands that march have good intentions but I also think they are seriously deluded in thinking that what they do will ever result in a cure. Perhaps one day we will have a black market with real cancer cures, it is obvious a cure will not arrive through big pharma, they make way too much money treating it.

Submitted by lonewolfbunn on February 20, 2010 - 4:29pm.

There is now basically a black market selling it. Google DCA and you won't find much helpful info about it but you will come across countless companies selling it. You of course will have difficulty knowing for sure it is what they say.

It can also be bought in bulk from companies that supply laboratories. That may be the only 100% sure way to know what you're getting.

I am currently looking into how it should be administered. I know there is very similar chemical that should not be mistaken for dichloroacetate.

I will post info about that in a few hours.

Submitted by lonewolfbunn on January 12, 2010 - 10:28pm.

http://www.thedcasite.com/dca_how_it_works.html

"DCA and How It Works

Dichloroacetic acid versus Sodium Dichloroacetate

Dichloroacetic acid is a small molecule, basically acetic acid with 2 chlorines. The molecular formula is Cl2CHCOOH.

Dichloroacetate is the sodium salt of dichloroacetic acid. Replace a hydrogen with sodium and you get Cl2CHCOONa

If you view the video from CTV you will see a jar of dichloroacetic acid prominently displayed. http://www.depmed.ualberta.ca/dca/vid1.htm [8] [The link doesn't work I believe CTV was pressured to pull the video from the internet - LoneWolf Bunn] is well worth watching. But they used a "cheap ...powder". Dichloroacetic acid only comes in liquid. The powder is the sodium salt of dichloroacetic acid. It is sodium dichloroacetate. The researchers did not use the acid.

For those of you searching for DCA, DO NOT BUY THE ACID. I posted info on the FAQ about it. The acid is not the same thing as the acetate. The acid is dangerously corrosive.

How does DCA work, briefly?

The Michelakis team reports that DCA turns on the mitochondria of cancer cells, allowing them to commit cellular suicide, or apoptosis.

Cancer cells shut down the mitochondria, which is the part of the cell that is involved in metabolism and, incidentally, initiates the cell suicide.

A non-cancerous cell will initiate apoptosis when it detects damage within itself that it cannot repair. But a cancer cell resists the suicide process. That is why chemotherapy and radiation treatments do not work very well and actually result in terrible side effects... the healthy cells actually die much easier.

Michelakis and his team discovered that they could re-activate the mitochondria of cancer cells. Not only that, the DCA is very effective in doing it: To quote from the Michelakis paper: "The decrease in [Ca2+]i occurs within 5 min and is sustained after 48 hr of DCA exposure." The mitochondria are so sensitive to DCA that just 5 minutes of exposure reactivates them for 48 hours.

The metabolic approach to cancer is supported by other research. Inhibition of Glycolysis in Cancer Cells: A Novel Strategy to Overcome Drug Resistance Associated with Mitochondrial Respiratory Defect and Hypoxia is a paper by a John Hopkins research team supporting this approach..."

Submitted by lonewolfbunn on January 13, 2010 - 1:46am.

Please bear with me. As with my research on toxic toys this leads to a labyrinth of wasteful information that must be carefully sifted through however I welcome any information anyone else is willing to post on this topic if it is from a reliable source.

Submitted by Aristotleded24 on January 17, 2010 - 5:47pm.

Think Before You Pink

Submitted by lonewolfbunn on January 17, 2010 - 8:18pm.

Aristotleded24 wrote:

Think Before You Pink

Thanks for that link Artistotled24.

For a few seconds I thought "think before you pink " was some kind of sarcastic comment until I realized it was link to a site with that name. The short video was a perfect way to demonstrate a point some activists have been trying to make for a very long time.

Cancer is a big business and cures are being denied. A cure for cancer would mean billions in lost revenue for companies that profit from slowly milking money from dying people. How they can sleep at night is beyond me.

Eli Lilly has a foolproof money making operation, cause cancer - then provide a treatment.

Thanks again.

Submitted by Doug on January 18, 2010 - 2:30pm.

There's probably no such thing as a cure for cancer because it's a disease originating in a wide variety of cell types because of a variety of genetic errors. The future is probably in providing personalized cures for one's particular cancer based on a DNA sequence of tumour cells.

Something like this, perhaps.

Submitted by lonewolfbunn on January 29, 2010 - 10:25pm.

That's a pretty dark grim world your mind is in Doug. Hopefully you are one of the few people who does not get cancer in his lifetime or you will wake up to a world even bleaker - one where you endure the agony of chemo and radiation treatments. It sounds like you're one of those who will go with the treatments that has never had to prove that it works and in fact has rarely ever worked yet it remains one of the most lucrative businesses in human history.

Though there is extensive amounts of evidence provided by years of research and millions of dollars from philanthropists to bring cures that work to the masses only the most archaic and obsolete treatments continue to be used on cancer patients.

Though the philanthropists who devote large portions of their holdings to once and for all end the needless suffering caused by the "modern treatments" (that the pharmaceutic industry continues to line their pockets providing) and the scientists who devote many years of their lives to proving that a common unpatentable, easy to manufacture substance will cure it, are denied the opportunity to see it provided.

So there is a fragment of your dismal outlook that I agree with and that is, "there's probably no such thing as a cure for cancer" that will be permitted to be used by those that profit from the death and suffering of the masses.

Submitted by lonewolfbunn on January 20, 2010 - 1:45am.

Now I wait for those who make posts attempting to liken the cure that has undergone extensive study and been proven safe by over 30 years of use in hospitals to "snakeoil scams", which will result in this thread to be closed due to length like the ethylmercury thread. Maybe SPACEbandit is a better name.

The motives of these people is beyond me. The optimist in me would like to believe it is merely ignorance but the realist in my believes there may be more involved.

Submitted by Lard Tunderin Jeezus on January 20, 2010 - 12:39am.

Another option to consider....

Submitted by lonewolfbunn on January 20, 2010 - 1:16am.

Lard Tunderin Zeesus thanks for keeping your statement short, though your statement holds alot of important words.
I will take the initiative to post the entire contents of your link.

When I refered to a SPACEbandit I was refering to a guy who wasted a lot of peoples TIME in another thread as well as starting meaningless insult matches that ate up all the space in that thread. Meanwhile there could have been people like you posting something of importance.

Thanks.

Reinventing the Pharmaceutical Industry, without the Industry
By Andrew Hessel
The founder of the Pink Army Cooperative is bringing the open-source development model to breast cancer therapies.

"If I were to tell you that volunteers working out of garages and bedrooms could play as big a role in the elimination of breast cancer by 2020 as a multibillion-dollar big pharmaceutical company, would you believe me?

I’m convinced it’s possible. That’s why I founded the Pink Army Cooperative. The Cooperative is not your average biotechnology startup. It’s an open source biotechnology venture that is member-owned and operated and not-for-profit. It’s working to create individualized therapies for breast cancer. The mission is to build a new drug development pipeline able to produce effective therapies faster for less money, without compromising safety.
Big Drug Makers versus Co-Op: Why Small Is Better

About six years ago, I realized that the cooperative model could change the future of medicine. I’d just spent years working inside a well-funded scientific playhouse where R&D should have moved forward at breakneck speed, but somehow it hadn’t. Technologies are changing fast, and drugs frequently fail in development.

It costs hundreds of millions, or even billions, of dollars to bring a drug to market, and the costs are still growing faster than inflation. Even the largest pharmaceutical companies are struggling. The bottom line? Making a new drug is an adventure with no guarantee of success at any cost. The question I asked myself was, why hasn’t the pipeline been scrapped and replaced with something that can accommodate development done faster, better, and cheaper?

There is no public route for drug development; virtually all development is industry-backed. I wondered, if open-source software could effectively challenge multibillion-dollar software franchises, could scientists and drug developers work cooperatively to compete with a product from a big pharmaceutical company? To my mind, breast cancer therapies were the obvious choice, since many people already give time and money toward finding a cure.

Perhaps the single most powerful tool for accomplishing this goal is openness, which allows everyone, amateur or professional, anywhere, to peek under the hood of the company, understand what is being done, and add his or her ideas or comments. I personally believe it’s lack of transparency and inability to share information easily that has held back the biopharma industry compared to the IT industry.

Overall, as biology becomes more digital, there is potential for massive change. Open access will make it easier to share ideas, publish protocols and tools, verify results, firewall bad designs, communicate best practices, and more. Individualized medicine development will be built on this open foundation, which will only help developers be more successful and lower risk.

It also permits a novel funding model — i.e., directly approaching those who would benefit from any breakthrough. Whereas traditional funding models require attracting a few individuals or groups able to make large investments, for which they expect a financial return, we can deliver our message widely, asking people to invest $20 in a membership, in exchange for sharing our data with the community. Finding people to support us and running the cooperative itself is made easier because of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

In the short term, I don’t see open-source drug development having a large effect on the U.S. health economy. The $2 trillion–plus system includes many products and services beyond just drugs. But there is room for a few examples to exist, make a real and measurable difference, and inspire others to experiment with nonprofit development. If Pink Army can treat even a single individual, I will consider the project a tremendous success, although I hope it will grow to treat millions of people with medicines that only get better and cheaper over time.
Personal Cures: From Individuals, For Individuals

The idea of cures or therapies that are unique to the individual is a critical component of the Pink Army Cooperative vision. A few years ago, the notion of cancer treatment that was specific to a person’s genome was seen as a fantasy. But thanks to rapidly moving technologies like synthetic biology, the prospects are very different today. This is a powerful new genetic engineering technology founded on DNA synthesis that amounts to writing software for cells. It’s the ideal technical foundation for open-source biotechnology. Moreover, synthetic biology drops the cost of doing bioengineering by several orders of magnitude. Small proteins, antibodies, and viruses were amenable to the technology and within reach of a startup.

Readers familiar with Wired editor Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail will recognize individualized medicine as the very end of the tail — a future of one product sold only to one person. I don’t think any company had seriously considered making these types of drugs before Pink Army. Most people accept that drugs cost hundreds of millions to make. Who could pay that much for a custom medicine, other than a few billionaires?

But individualized drugs could lower the cost of drug development across the entire spectrum of the development chain. Only very small-scale manufacturing capability is necessary. Lab testing is simplified. And clinical trials are reduced to a single person: No large phased trials are necessary, so there’s no ambiguity about who will be treated, and every patient can be rigorously profiled. This shaves money and years off development. Moreover, with the client fully informed and integral to all aspects of development and testing, the developer’s liability approaches the theoretical minimum.

My interest in breast cancer is personal and professional. Because it affects so many women — roughly 12% — almost everyone has been touched by breast cancer either personally or through someone they know. But cancer has always been central to my work as a genetic scientist, and I’m lucky to have been involved with several breast cancer–related projects during my time in biopharma. Curing cancer should be straightforward: It’s about making a better antibiotic, but the search for a cure seems to have stalled. It’s time to see if open-source drug development can reboot the process. That’s why Pink Army is important."

About the Author
Andrew Hessel is a geneticist and founder of the Pink Army Cooperative in Alberta, Canada. Web site www.pinkarmy.org.

Submitted by lonewolfbunn on February 20, 2010 - 4:24pm.

from Global News
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzJs7g6He88

"...Researchers there [University of Alberta] have found that a certain compound can shrink tumours in the lungs, breast, and brain. And best of all it's nontoxic...

...They're now in the process of securing private funding - none from drug companies so the drug can be available inexpensively..."

Submitted by Tigana on February 5, 2010 - 10:36pm.

Shhh, lonewolfbunn, if cancer patients get well that might mean others lose their JOBS...

Submitted by lonewolfbunn on February 9, 2010 - 12:13am.

Tigana wrote:

Shhh, lonewolfbunn, if cancer patients get well that might mean others lose their JOBS...

Hi Tigana, this is for you -{--@

But your right - My Goodness. Think of all those poor CEO's having to drive a BMW instead of a Rolls Royce. And all those morticians - losing half their business. Someone should set up a charity for them. For only $666 dollars a day you can help these downtrodden souls maintain some of their most basic needs...

But seriously now, I managed to find one newsclip from CTY that was not removed from youtube.
It is far more indepth than the others I posted.

Watch it now before they find it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ij9PwnjSZg&feature=related

And if anyone knows how to download from youtube could you please do it then PM me and let me know how? I've lost so much evidence of amazing things, then the evidence of the amazing corruption rears it's ugly head when newsclips for things like waterfuel and cancer-cures are suddenly removed.

Submitted by Lard Tunderin Jeezus on February 18, 2010 - 8:58pm.

lonewolfbunn - If you liked that last article, you'll love this one:

Open source drug discovery tackles TB

Submitted by lonewolfbunn on February 20, 2010 - 4:10pm.

Yes I did,

Thanks LTJ.

Submitted by lonewolfbunn on February 20, 2010 - 4:45pm.

For my baby sister who's preventable death drew me onto this path to prevent others from dying from a curable and preventable disease.
I wish I knew then what I know now.

Before your time

"Maybe in another life
I could find you there
Pulled away before your time
I can't deal, it's so unfair

And it feels, and it feels like
Heaven's so far away
And it feels, yeah it feels like
The world has grown cold
Now that you've gone away

Leaving flowers on your grave
To show that I still care
But black roses and Hail Mary's
Can't bring back what's taken from me

I reach to the sky
And call out your name
And if I could trade
I would

And it feels, and it feels like
Heaven's so far away
And it stings, yeah it stings now
The world is so cold
Now that you've gone away..."

Those people who allow children to die due to their "concerns" about over-population should do the rest of humanity a favour and slit their own necks if they are so phucking concerned.

Submitted by lonewolfbunn on July 2, 2010 - 4:55pm.

The NON-profit group whose goal it is to see that DCA is available to the public affordably has had lawyers trying to stop them from the day they started. http://www.thedcasite.com

Surprisingly it is the lawyers hired by the University of Alberta. Why???

Submitted by lonewolfbunn on July 2, 2010 - 5:01pm.

http://www.thedcasite.com/dca_commentary.html

Commentary, by Jim Tassano:

"...We have sure had our battles bringing DCA to the world. The researchers at the University of Alberta fought us from the start. A lawyer connected to them wrote me and called theDCAsite.com a "criminal website". They proudly proclaim their involvement in the shutdown of buyDCA.com.

Most doctors won't have anything to do with DCA. I hear constantly from cancer patients and their supporters that their doctors refuse, sometimes angrily, to even listen to talk of DCA. Or they state they would lose their jobs if they helped a patient with DCA.

"Oracle" told me he was banned from a university cancer chat room for talking about DCA.

The FDA won't help. The FDA drug approval system is based on patents and profits. There is no system to approve unpatentable drugs. What company would risk spending hundreds of millions of dollars with no guarantee of approval for a drug they cannot own? And we cannot expect the government to spend money to get DCA and other unpatentable drugs approved, as it would put the government in direct competition with private industry.

The pharmaceutical companies will not want people using DCA, caffeine, vitamin B1 and citric acid curing their cancers. You cannot blame them, as they will lose a fortune if DCA proves to be a first treatment of choice. This would devastate their business and the cancer industry, said to be over $100 Billion in the U.S. alone. Currently the pharmaceutical industry is waging a war against supplements. They certainly do not want people to have access to compounds like DCA that can cost $20 to $30 A MONTH.

Congress won't help. The pharmaceutical industry contributes to election campaigns, swamps Washington with lobbyists, and offers many politicians jobs after their terms are over. Money talks in Washington, and the pharmaceutical lobby talks the loudest.

Despite decades of research and unthinkable sums of money, the death rates from most cancers are as high as they were in 1930. Being diagnosed with cancer is practically a death sentence, as well as a guarantee of great physical and financial suffering. The FDA-pharma system has failed miserably in cancer therapy.

Society has no simple solution, at least one that special interests will not try to hinder with campaigns of seeding doubt and buying legislative actions. We need to take action ourselves."

Submitted by lonewolfbunn on July 17, 2010 - 7:46am.

It was my sister's death that sent me to spend years researching cancer and it's potential cures.

I studied the healing properties of the plants gifted to humanity and I spent years attempting to provide evidence. And I have. But that was not good enough even though the results were verified by highly credible scientists.

Though I continue in my belief that the cures for terminal diseases requires a combination of science and spiritual healing I need to force forward the scientific evidence of cures derived of synthetic chemicals.

This is not some Hippy-tea but something used in hospitals for over 30 years. There are no side effects. It was used to treat a rare disorder but someone discovered that it cures cancer.

Well guess what? Now the pharmaceutical industry is openly admitting that it will not be used in public hospitals simply because THERE IS NO PROFIT in it. While I was happy to hear my conspiracy theory finally confirmed - the intensity of my anger cannot be denied.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KP6a05oQvWY

This link is a demomstration of the corruption.

That Dr. Michelakis character has a team of lawyers attempting to deny people access to a cure for cancer that is pennies per dose. So far they have been successful at shutting down buyDCA-dot-com which was a nonprofit company and one of the few places to buy genuine DCA. My theory is that they want to slightly alter the molecule enough that it can be patented and exclusively owned. That is the only logical explanation for them resisting the use of DCA that I see,

Oh wait... could it be because they are worried there might be mild side-effects LIKE THERE ARE WITH CHEMO?

[26]

Sane CNN HN Glenn Beck covers University of Alberta Research into Dichloroacetate (DCA) and Cancer [27] www.youtube.com [28] Sane CNN HN Glenn Beck covers University of Alberta Research into Dichloroacetate (DCA) and Cancer-Before he became a Fox News sickophant.

Running for the Cure - Chasing the Dangling Carrot

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