The Vitamin Kid

Avoiding bad medicine and finding non-toxic treatments that actually work

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Location: Ankeny, Iowa, United States

Thursday, February 01, 2007

FLASH! Cancer Research Breakthrough

This just in, from my mailbox. The writer is a biochemist who has been working to unravel cellular abnormalities in autism and chronic fatigue syndrome, and devise ways to normalize them. This could truly be a major breakthrough, because it works on one of the most basic problems with all cancer cells -- they cannot die through the normal God-designed process for eliminating cells, apoptosis. Apoptosis is a self-destruct feature built into all cells. Cancer cells subvert this process, becoming immortal, and the uncontrolled growth of immortal cells can kill the victim.

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I want to let you know about what appears to me to be a major breakthrough in research on cancer treatment. I'm not selling anything, and I was not involved with the research, but I think it's very exciting! I hope you won't think I've parted company with my sanity when I tell you this.

I'm referring to work recently published by researchers at the University of Alberta in Canada. The full paper can be found at the following site:

http://www.depmed.ualberta.ca/dca/cancer_cell.pdf

I'm not exaggerating when I call this a major breakthrough.

Briefly, these esearchers have found that a relatively simple, non-patentable substance, namely dichloroacetate, which has been used in the past to control lactic acidosis in children with mitochondrial disease, is able to knock out a variety of types of cancer cells without causing systemic problems. They have demonstrated this by experiments in three types of human cancer cell cultures and in mice.

This substance works by blocking the enzyme pyruvate dehydrogenase kinase, ausing pyruvate to be converted to acetyl Co-A and be fed into the Krebs cycle, instead of being reduced to lactic acid as normally occurs in cancer cells, and thus forcing the cancer cells to change their metabolism from glycolysis to oxidative phosphorylation, like normal cells. As a result of this change, they are able to cause these cells to undergo apoptosis and die, rather than being immortal as cancer cells are. In the mice, they put this substance in their drinking water, and they began to see effects on their cancer within one week!

Because it operates on a feature that is common to all cancer cells (as shown by Otto Warburg in 1930, for which he won the Nobel prize), this substance promises to be a universal treatment for all types of cancers.

Because it is nonpatentable, it should be relatively inexpensive. This also means that non-pharma money will have to be found for the phase II and III clinical trials, and they've started a fund for that.

Because there is already a history of using this substance in humans to treat lactic acidosis in mitochondrial disease, it is already known that the side effects are mnimal.

I am fairly familiar with the biochemistry of the intermediary metabolism, and I can tell you that the paper looks good to me. I would invite comments from others on this. If this is what it looks like to me, the ramifications are huge to society, the economy, the cancer industry, and to all of us as individuals. I think this will make it even more imperative that we figure out what to do for Alzheimer's, because the average life expectancy is going to jump.

When futurists used to talk about the possibility of "a cure for cancer" being found, I always thought they were nuts! I don't think so anymore.

Rich Van Konynenburg, Ph.D.


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New Scientist article on the breakthrough here.

Donate for phase II and III trials here.

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