|
?:reviewBody
|
-
In 2007, medical researchers at the University of Alberta reported that dichloroacetate (DCA), a relatively simple compound, had showed promise for treating cancer in rodent models, and the university's DCA Research Team announced they would begin clinical trials of DCA on human patients in the spring of 2007. One of the members of that research team, Dr. Evangelos Michelakis, expressed concern that because DCA was not patented, the potential profit margins in marketing it would likely be small, and thus it might be difficult to obtain funding for DCA clinical trials from private investors: Unfortunately, this preliminary information soon led to hyperbolic claims that a simple cure for cancer had been found but a lack of interest on the part of pharmaceutical companies was preventing it from reaching cancer patients, prompting some desperate cancer sufferers to seek it out for themselves from unscrupulous vendors: Despite investigators' concerns about potential difficulties in obtaining funding, DCA studies have been undertaken, and in 2010 the substance was in the news again after researchers published a paper reporting their results with testing DCA on glioblastoma tumors: As Dr. J. Leonard Lichtenfeld, Deputy Chief Medical Officer for the national office of the American Cancer Society, wrote of that last study in 2010, DCA studies appear to be worth pursuing, but the substance is still far from being proved an effective treatment for any type of cancer, much less a cancer cure: As New Scientist noted as recently as July 2016, dichloroacetate still has not lived up to the potential ascribed to it several years ago:
(en)
|
![[This page as RDF]](http://data.gesis.org/claimskg/static/rdf-icon.gif){kind=icon}