Scientists cure cancer but no one takes notice

B_VinylBoy

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Wow...

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? - Scientists cure cancer, but no one takes notice


To be fair, I didn't find this article till today so I'm sure as it becomes more viral we'll see some of the American journalists start to look this one up. And I'm not that well versed in Science & Biology to be able to explain or figure out this process in any major detail. However, with the current issues existing in our medical and health care systems it's really telling why "big pharma" isn't saying much about this.
 

D_c42vywrth

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Very, very unlikely that they found one single cure for cancer. Cancer is after all, really 100s of diseases, many of which have their own individual causes- seems dubious to me- and no, I am not a pharmaceutical rep ;)
 

helgaleena

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D_Gunther Snotpole

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^^^^^^^^^^^^
And the first comment on the article that VB linked to also dates from 2007.

This article has been around a long time and had very little effect on anyone. And that, I'm sure, is because such ripe predictions are a dime a dozen and seldom borne out in further clinical studies, human trials, etc.

I liked one of the comments that a reader left:

Could someone please provide us with a link to the research journal which has studied this drug and its effect on cancer because i would love to read further into it, as un-sourced this article is just another piece of internet jargon and cocka. A very intriguing principal, however and I truly believe that there are perfect drugs out there that as economics dictate our world will be left unused when they could change the world as we know it.

Considering the amount of time that has passed, this has no doubt been looked at by many journalists and medical researchers who poked around and found very little to write about.
 

Bbucko

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^^^^^^^^^^^^
And the first comment on the article that VB linked to also dates from 2007.

This article has been around a long time and had very little effect on anyone. And that, I'm sure, is because such ripe predictions are a dime a dozen and seldom borne out in further clinical studies, human trials, etc.

I liked one of the comments that a reader left:

Could someone please provide us with a link to the research journal which has studied this drug and its effect on cancer because i would love to read further into it, as un-sourced this article is just another piece of internet jargon and cocka. A very intriguing principal, however and I truly believe that there are perfect drugs out there that as economics dictate our world will be left unused when they could change the world as we know it.

Considering the amount of time that has passed, this has no doubt been looked at by many journalists and medical researchers who poked around and found very little to write about.

Considering how much time and effort I've taken trying to learn as much as possible about HIV/AIDS, my litmus test is a peer-reviewed study published in a scientific journal. These days, with the internet so handily available, any source that states a scientific "fact" needs to be backed up with as much legitimate science as possible, beginning with a published, peer-reviewed article.
 

D_Gunther Snotpole

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Considering how much time and effort I've taken trying to learn as much as possible about HIV/AIDS, my litmus test is a peer-reviewed study published in a scientific journal. These days, with the internet so handily available, any source that states a scientific "fact" needs to be backed up with as much legitimate science as possible, beginning with a published, peer-reviewed article.
Bingo.
 

JustAsking

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Considering how much time and effort I've taken trying to learn as much as possible about HIV/AIDS, my litmus test is a peer-reviewed study published in a scientific journal. These days, with the internet so handily available, any source that states a scientific "fact" needs to be backed up with as much legitimate science as possible, beginning with a published, peer-reviewed article.

That would be in the right direction, of course, but you also have to consider the journal. And also you need to wait for the article to be cited by a number of independent researchers to see if it proves out.

Peer review is an ok quality control on work that is being submitted, but it is not a process where the work is duplicated to see if it pans out.

You probably already know this, but I thought I would make the distinction.
 

Big_Red

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This "news" is about 4 years old, but thanks for the reminder. Most people in the cancer biz don't know anything about it.

From Dichloroacetic acid - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia :

When faced with the high costs of getting Food and Drug Administration approval, estimated by Tufts University to exceed one billion dollars,[41] the chance of getting DCA approved for the treatment of cancer in the United States is extremely low. This problem is highlighted in the 2007 New York Times article by Ralph Moss titled "Patents over Patients".
The cancer industry, just in the US alone, brings in over $200 billion of revenue every single year. A cure would erase all that revenue, which would threaten trillions of dollars of stock market value. Can't have that.

The largest DCA clinic in the world operates about 15 minutes away from me. They have cured patients of metastatic cancers where the 5 year survival rate is less than 15%. But, according to the arcane rules of the FDA and Health Canada, that doesn't constitute any evidence of effectiveness.

This will go on until a certain tipping point is reached and cancer sufferers, and their families, have finally had enough.

Interestingly, a shortage of cancer drugs and pain meds has been announced over the past couple of weeks- and this when the cancer rate is supposedly decreasing and manufacturing capacity has never been higher. No explanation given, of course. This is no different from the oil cartel shutting down refinery capacity to drive gas prices up, or the banking cartel from threatening another Great Depression if they don't get a trillion dollars' worth of bailout money from the plebes.
 
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Calboner

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From Skepticblog:

ANOTHER CURE FOR CANCER?

by STEVEN NOVELLA, May 16 2011

The writer is a neurologist at Yale University School of Medicine and the founder and president of the New England Skeptical Society. Some excerpts:
This story is a variation on the notion that “they have cured cancer” but the cure is being kept from the masses by greedy interests aided by the lazy and apathetic. . . .

But on close inspection the story makes no sense. The core flaw in this notion is the unstated premise that the medical establishment is a monolithic entity capable of acting with one intent. Rather, like many aspects of our civilization, modern medicine is a complex organism with many independent parts, and no one piece has dominion over all the others. . . .

The notion of “a cure for cancer” is also highly improbable. Cancer is not a single disease, but a category of disease with a great deal of variation. That is why there are numerous treatments for cancer, and treatments need to be specifically tailored to the cancer type, stage, and location, as well as the individual patient. . . .

DCA falls under the category of prematurely promoting an experimental drug before it has been adequately studied. It can sound very compelling to hear the story of how DCA works to kill cancer cells. It certainly sounds like it is a cure for cancer. But medical researchers have been here before. Many potential treatments look good in the test tube, but do not eventually work as treatments in humans. . . .

A common story in the cancer-treatment world is that a new potential treatment, based upon a novel approach, is sensationalized as a cure for cancer. But then 5-10 years later we still haven’t cured cancer. But what has often happened is that the new treatment works, it just has a limited role in a subset of cancers. It prolongs survival and is being used – it’s just not the “cure” that it was originally hyped to be. . . .

So don’t believe the conspiracy-mongering and the hype. The research is happening. It is being targeted largely to therapies in proportion to their promise. But unfortunately research progresses much more slowly than rumors spread through Facebook and Twitter.
 
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Big_Red

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Here's another skeptic's take on cancer (a guy who I almost always disagree with, btw):

CSI | The War on Cancer A Progress Report for Skeptics

In 1971, President Nixon and Congress declared war on cancer. Since then, the federal government has spent well over $105 billion on the effort (Kolata 2009b).
...
On the other hand, Gina Kolata pointed out in The New York Times that the cancer death rate, adjusted for the size and age of the population, has decreased by only 5 percent since 1950 (Kolata 2009a). She argues that there has been very little overall progress in the war on cancer.

Hundreds of billions of dollars spent on research. Very little progress. $200 billion per year spent on cancer treatment in the US alone. Nuff said.
 

D_Hawkeye Pierced

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Unfortunately, effects like these seen on cells, or called in vitro, rarely translates to anything near the same effect in animals (in vivo) or in humans. I am doing my PhD on targeting an array of different cancers, and we can increase accumulation into cancer cells almost 2000-fold using different targeting strategies but when we go into animal models we see maybe a 20% increase. Unfortunately, people that work with bench to bedside translation know this. It will be approximately 7-10 years from an in vitro discovery to being close to being submitted to the FDA after proper clinical trials. We are all waiting for the 'magic bullet' to cure cancer but unfortunately we have to learn to identify and target individual cancers on a per patient basis. So something like this 'cure' for cancer may someday be added to the arsenal of cancer treatments however it will not be a 'cure'. In all reality we have made leaps and bounds in increasing the time a patient lives after being diagnosed as well as increasing the quality of that time. This is going to be a slow race to win, but we are making progress, and in order to remind ourselves of this fact we must not look at where we are now, but where we were 10 years ago.
 

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Unfortunately, effects like these seen on cells, or called in vitro, rarely translates to anything near the same effect in animals (in vivo) or in humans. I am doing my PhD on targeting an array of different cancers, and we can increase accumulation into cancer cells almost 2000-fold using different targeting strategies but when we go into animal models we see maybe a 20% increase. Unfortunately, people that work with bench to bedside translation know this. It will be approximately 7-10 years from an in vitro discovery to being close to being submitted to the FDA after proper clinical trials. We are all waiting for the 'magic bullet' to cure cancer but unfortunately we have to learn to identify and target individual cancers on a per patient basis. So something like this 'cure' for cancer may someday be added to the arsenal of cancer treatments however it will not be a 'cure'. In all reality we have made leaps and bounds in increasing the time a patient lives after being diagnosed as well as increasing the quality of that time. This is going to be a slow race to win, but we are making progress, and in order to remind ourselves of this fact we must not look at where we are now, but where we were 10 years ago.

Even with this genius people still die. It's my belief, if there were cures
the drug companies would go bust, it's all about the money.:mad:
 

Calboner

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Even with this genius people still die. It's my belief, if there were cures the drug companies would go bust, it's all about the money.
If I interpret your post correctly, you think that the only reason why there is no cure for cancer is that the drug companies, out of self-interest, don't allow one to be produced. This shows such ignorance of how medical research and the pharmaceutical industry work that you should simply stop holding opinions in the matter.

First of all, you apparently think that it is easy to cure cancer. Anyone with the slightest knowledge of how cancer works can tell you that cancers work in so many different ways that there is nothing surprising at all about our inability to thwart all of them. A friend of mine who works in biotechnology described cancer as "devilish" because of the seeming resourcefulness of its workings: you knock out one genetic pathway on which it works and it simply finds another.

Further, your idea that drug companies avoid producing a cure because if they found one they would "go bust" does not even make sense as a fantasy in its own right: if the drug companies had a cure, they would make even more money than they do now.

Finally, of course, your fantasy would require drug companies to act in benign cooperation with each other so that none of them discover a cure for cancer, rather than to compete with each other to gain advantage by discovering cures. Once again, this is not only in blatant defiance of reality but does not even make sense in itself, as your hypothesis is that "it's all about the money." Companies driven by self-interest are not going to refrain from doing what will gain them advantage over their competitors!

If you can't better ground your opinions in fact, you should at least suspend judgment about matters of which you know so little.
 

Big_Red

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if the drug companies had a cure, they would make even more money than they do now.

That's assuming the cure was either a unique substance or process that could be patented. If not, then the drug companies, used to gross margins in the tens of thousands of percent, would not even bother to produce the cure in question. Only small margin producers would get into that game. The bottom line is that, unless an effective cure to cancer could be patented, the drug companies would lose hundreds of billions of dollars in annual revenue which would threaten trillions of dollars of stock market capitalization.

Finally, of course, your fantasy would require drug companies to act in benign cooperation with each other so that none of them discover a cure for cancer, rather than to compete with each other to gain advantage by discovering cures. Once again, this is not only in blatant defiance of reality but does not even make sense in itself, as your hypothesis is that "it's all about the money." Companies driven by self-interest are not going to refrain from doing what will gain them advantage over their competitors!
Yeah, exactly! We all know that the biggest banks in the history of the world didn't act in "benign cooperation" to bankrupt their smaller competitors during the financial crisis. Or how the largest energy producers in the history of the world don't purposefully limit refinery capacity to keep gas prices up (and won't even think about buying out or bankrupting anyone who dare try to compete with them). And the government, as we all know, will never step in and try to help industry with bailouts or legislation designed to limit competition. Nah, those are all just conspiracy theories. :rolleyes::tongue:
 

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If I interpret your post correctly, you think that the only reason why there is no cure for cancer is that the drug companies, out of self-interest, don't allow one to be produced. This shows such ignorance of how medical research and the pharmaceutical industry work that you should simply stop holding opinions in the matter.

First of all, you apparently think that it is easy to cure cancer. Anyone with the slightest knowledge of how cancer works can tell you that cancers work in so many different ways that there is nothing surprising at all about our inability to thwart all of them. A friend of mine who works in biotechnology described cancer as "devilish" because of the seeming resourcefulness of its workings: you knock out one genetic pathway on which it works and it simply finds another.

Further, your idea that drug companies avoid producing a cure because if they found one they would "go bust" does not even make sense as a fantasy in its own right: if the drug companies had a cure, they would make even more money than they do now.

Finally, of course, your fantasy would require drug companies to act in benign cooperation with each other so that none of them discover a cure for cancer, rather than to compete with each other to gain advantage by discovering cures. Once again, this is not only in blatant defiance of reality but does not even make sense in itself, as your hypothesis is that "it's all about the money." Companies driven by self-interest are not going to refrain from doing what will gain them advantage over their competitors!

If you can't better ground your opinions in fact, you should at least suspend judgment about matters of which you know so little.

Really, how many people have you known "personally", that had this
disease. Well I have known many, friends. relatives,customers that
have fallen to this disease. All of them go though the same revolving
door of treatment. Radiation, Chemotherapy or both if one or the
doesn't take in the meantime these people waste away and end result
death. I will have to admit any progess that was made only prolonged
the eneviable. Even the people that were "cured" ended up in most
cases reuccured, but this time it has made its way not only where it
started but in other parts of the body. I have a customer, his wife
has been to every specialist in the country, all gave her basicall the
same results. The this very man resorted to other doctors in Mexico
prolonged the symtoms but now she is worse is now counting the
minutes. Fact's that know little about, sonny you knw half of it. I been
around a little longer you and seen a lot of things. And when I think
of the countless millions spent will little return I have resevations toward
the drug industry in itself.