(NaturalNews) A cheap, simple and safe drug currently being used to treat rare metabolic disorders may be the golden ticket to fighting certain cancers, a Canadian study says.
Since it is non-patented, it could be produced on a mass scale by multiple suppliers.
The drug is called Dichloroacetate, or DCA, and it can repair damage to mitochondria affected by cancer, creating large decreases in cancerous tumors. Positive results from the drug were shown in both animal model tests and test tubes. It also has been tested on genetically cultured human cells.
Most importantly, it can kill cancerous cells, including the often unstoppable lung cancer, without affecting other healthy cells and tissues, which differs DCA from many chemotherapies.
Researchers at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada did the tests, finding that in addition to fighting lung cancer, DCA can also decimate brain and breast cancer.
DCA utilizes the way cancer cells energize themselves and uses that to work against the cancerous growth. A cancer cell will often eat sugars in the cell, using a process called glycolysis. Previous consensus among scientists was that cancer cells use glycolysis to stay alive because the mitochondria had been damaged beyond functioning levels.
The researchers in Edmonton found that DCA reawakens mitochondria, which holds a secondary function: the ability to tell abnormal cells to self-destruct. Without this self-destruct mode being active, abnormal cancerous cells have the ability to be “immortal,” and increase over time because they are not dying like regular cells. Initial studies show that DCA reverses this.
The next move for the study is to do clinical tests using DCA in patients with cancer, reported the Chinese web site People’s Daily Online. These tests may need to be paid for by charities, universities and government agencies, as pharmaceutical are not likely to support an unpatented medicine because they cannot profit from it, the magazine New Scientist reported in its January issue.
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