New Scientist reports hopeful news on the health front:
It sounds almost too good to be true: a cheap and simple drug that kills almost all cancers... dichloroacetate (DCA), has already been used for years to treat rare metabolic disorders and so is known to be relatively safe.update & bump April 22 2007:
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.
Though there is still potential for DCA to become a cure, the hype may be premature. Other articles pro and con here, here, here, here, here, and... lots more.
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