there might be a cure for cancer

crazy_dude6662

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn10971-cheap-safe-drug-kills-most-cancers.html


hopefully will work inside the body

what do you all think?

r3nu4l

I think it should go here

These drugs have been available for years. This article is a few weeks old now.

There was a letter to NewScientist from another Scientist a week or to ago stating that there are also problems with these drugs and reasons why they cannot as yet be used to treat cancer. I can't find a link for it but I read it in the hardcopy version.

EDIT:
From the Study Centre website:

At this point, the University of Alberta, the Alberta Cancer Board and Capital Health do not condone or advise the use of dichloroacetate (DCA) in human beings for the treatment of cancer since no human beings have gone through clinical trials using DCA to treat cancer.

They go on to state that they will place the drugs into Phase I and Phase II trials soon. That means that these drugs are at least five to seven years away from approval for even one type of cancer...all going well! Don't get your hopes up just yet

madhitchhiker

I'd still love to hope. And it's a real good news!;)

There is a cure for cancer. It's called Chuck Norris.

Inappropriate, maybe. Funny, probably not.

But I really do hope there is a cure for cancer, it is one of the biggest killers out there, isnt it?

Schlemm

That's really interesting, there's been some pretty innovative treatments for cancer in recent times. We're starting to see a trend in cancer therapies which will make cancer a sort of 'chronic' illness as it were. There was an interesting theory fairly recently where scientists were activating immune cells of cancer paitents so that the body would mount a stronger immune response to the cancer. Pity the clinical trials are so long tho...you hear all about these new cures in the news but not half enought in real life!

Pighead

Deleted User wrote:

But I really do hope there is a cure for cancer, it is one of the biggest killers out there, isnt it?

Old age is a big one too apparently. Damn death wrinkles.

r3nu4l

Schlemm wrote:

Pity the clinical trials are so long tho...you hear all about these new cures in the news but not half enought in real life!

The trials have to take that long and if anything in many cases are rushed. All of these things are not "cures", they are compounds that show promise of varying degrees.

Quite often these compounds are found to be toxic to humans while mice may quite happily ingest them with no problems. In some cases drugs are released after years of trials and it is only 10 or 15 years later that it is doscovered that while it cured one disease it caused another. Thankfully, due to more rigorous trials these days, this is happening less frequently but it is still happening.

Also, it's worth noting that many of the chemotherapy agents out there can also kill you or cause you to develop other cancers and that is why chemotherapy is heavily managed by oncologists (Cancer doctors). Their job is to manage and balance the risk factors to tilt them in your favour.

slipss

It will be great if it turns out to be as effective as they think it is but I wouldn't get your hopes up. For the last ten years or so every 6 months theres a study published, saying they've made a breakthrough cancer discovery, I've heard scientists claim all sorts of drugs cure all sorts of cancer cancer aswell as chilli, curry, brocolli ect, extracts, but you never hear anything about them beyond the intitial testing, so I presume the research keeps runing into a dead end. In otherwords I'll believe it when they start using it a a large scale in hospitals and not just on single isolated cells in some lab somewhere.

InFront

Mitochondria do it again \o/. Well done little smacs.

That's definitely a good-news-story, very interesting, I hope it is significant enough to be of benefit