What if there wasn’t a patent on the cure for cancer?

I’m still not up to writing an actual post. But, I just stumbled across this article in New Scientist magazine. And some of you might be as interested as me:

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.

Evangelos Michelakis of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and his colleagues tested DCA on human cells cultured outside the body and found that it killed lung, breast and brain cancer cells, but not healthy cells. Tumours in rats deliberately infected with human cancer also shrank drastically when they were fed DCA-laced water for several weeks.

What do you think?.


0 Responses to What if there wasn’t a patent on the cure for cancer?

  1. I read this the other day and thought “GREAT !” Now, let’s see what happens. Of course the big question is whether longer term use causes problems.

    There are several people in my circle of realworld friends (two co-workers, one died of bone cancer, another with brain cancer) and online friends (Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake most recently, with her THIRD siege of breast cancer– see http://www.firedoglake.com/2007/01/16/three-time-loser-winner/) who are going through varying degree of hell. Let us hope and pray this is AN answer, if not THE answer.