Dichloroacetate (DCA) and Cancer

The blogoshpere is alive with conspiracy theories about big pharma blocking the cancer cure DCS because it is not patentable. Actually, they don’t need to block it. Since it isn’t patentable, pharma doesn’t want to put up the money for some drug trials, so DCA is not going anywhere fast.  Here‘s the latest research article on DCA. Seems promising, but it was a very very small experiment.  Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately if you have cancer and DCA actually works), a clinic in Toronto has been prescribing DCA for cancer treatment (link). This makes DCA look, well, suspect. This attitude towards DCA is not going to help get drug trial funding for it. Interestingly, the physician from the Toronto clinic just published case report about successful (of course) treatment with DCA in the Journal of Palliative Medicine (link).  In the end, it would be the government that would have to foot the bill for a drug trial. Cancer’s pretty expensive for society and governments  (link), but I don’t know what types of cancer DCA might be good for, so I can’t calculate how much a drug trial (or maybe several) would cost in relation to the amount of potential savings from a cheap cancer treatment.