OK Since I guess you can't cut and paste a PDF, I have hand entered the following paragraph from the subject paper so please excuse any typos. I do not pretend to be a biochemist but I do see here that the Kv 1.5 were cloned. Of course I don't know what Kv1.5 is. But for lack of an answer to my question, I am going to assume this means the cancer cells were cloned. With this assumption, I will assert that the the success of DCA on cloned cells is not a sufficiently valid reason for people to be experimenting at home with the stuff. Here is the paragraph:

Kv1.5 Gene Transfer
A549 cells were infected with replication-deficient serotype-5 adeno-
virus encoding genes for GFP and cloned human Kv1.5(both under cytomegalovirus (CMV promoters) as previously described (McMurtry et al.,2005; Pozeg et al. 2003). We achieved 80% infection rates, and infected cells were selected on the basis of there green fluorescence.

My take is that most of the self administrators of DCA are taking a fairly well-educated and reasonable risk after considerable research and a careful weighing of their other options.

By the way, are you under extra stress at this time because you or someone close to you is a cancer patient?

Or, perhaps you are some kind of cog in the giant and very lucrative "machine" of FDA-sanctioned cancer treatment?

Otherwise, your attitude is a little mystifying.....

Mr. Incoming is rightly frustrated with our healthcare system. I am for no-profit universal health care. I am against toxic and expensive treatments which only poison the body and do not cure the disease. My friend was diagnosed with tongue cancer in late 2005.

My friend went to MD Anderson for chemo and a long series of radiation treatments. She had to have a gastrostomy tube put in. After all the treatments, the disease was still there.

Then we tried Gerson Therapy. We paid $1500 for a Norwalk juicer and followed the program to the letter- everything organic. When my friend dropped down to 78 pounds, we both know our efforts had failed. Charlotte Gerson had warned us that her father's therapy requires the patient be able to eat by mouth.

After a visit to our primary doctor, we signed up with a hospice organization who promised to make my friend comfortable. At the same time another friend, also a cancer patient, introduced us the an oncologist who had a new type chemo-Erbitux- and we decided to give it a try. That was six months ago. Today my friend is in remission and weighs 98 pounds. We don't know what tomorrow will bring. We do know that our oncologist save her life.

I am very excited about what I have read about DCA. I have also been reading about epigenetics- a relatively new area of research which has determined that genes do not have to mutate to make a cell go bad. The studies by Michelakis seem to validate this idea. Now there is tremendous hope that cancer treatment can be targeted to the cancer cells only. What I do not know is whether or not DCA has any hope of being effective in people. I have great respect for our oncologist. I must believe that he has asked a very valid question and I am looking forward to finding the answer. Would anyone else like to hear the answer? So far I am not hearing an answer. So I am still waiting.

Then, you want to start making blanket statements (e.g., "With this assumption, I will assert that the the success of DCA on cloned cells is not a sufficiently valid reason for people to be experimenting at home with the stuff.").

Then, it's back to the "I'm-just-a-humble-knowledge-seeker" role.

Now, it's fine for someone to have reasonable degree of faith in their oncologist (or, their latest oncologist, or, whatever).

What's not fine is for someone to take one oncologist's comment on one very possibly tangential and/or irrelevant issue and run with it to the extent of making blanket condemnations.

How many papers has your oncologist published in highly respected journals, by the way?

Here's what's really relevant: People who are "experimenting at home" with DCA are reporting some remarkable successes which I tend to believe because of the way it zapped a growth of mine that I'm almost sure was cancerous.

Here's another relevant point: The FDA is reportedly keeping a close eye on this site and also the "buydca.com" site where I purchased my supply. Given the "big brother" mentality that's probably rampant within the FDA (especially where "big pharma" isn't involved) it would hardly be surprising if they moved aggressively to soon limit and/or eliminate private access to DCA.

"Cloning or not" is generally misunderstood - the scientific terminology doesn`t translate well to laymen.

In this case, the A549 cells are an immortalised cell line derived from a lung tumour. They are essentially cancer cells from another patient that have been kept alive in a lab for (potentially) many years. They are essentially all copies of the same cell (give or take).

The problem with this research is that (as the oncologist seems to be getting at) the cells are not an endogenous tumour. The research seems reasonably well done, but it is not measuring the ability of DCA to counteract a random tumour that grows within a specific individual. There are many other studies like this that show similar effects with different treatments. DCA has caught the attention because it makes a nice conspiracy-like story, and is easy to get hold of.

Best of luck with the attempts to help people out, but I hope that people take care. I also hope that it is possible to generate some perspective as the the effectiveness of this medication - I guess that it is hard to post back if it doesn`t work/has severe adverse effects.

Is the site owner donating profits on DCA sales to cancer research, out of interest?

In a follow-up conversation with our oncologist, he said that with cancer treatment, there is not going to be a single magic bullet. He told us that curing the disease requires that one determine what happened at its inception and then that knowledge must be used to formulate a treatment or combination of treatments.

I questiond the mindset that it is necessary to kill every genetic variation of every cancer cell. I suggested that the DCA paper demonstrates that for at least one line of cloned cancer cells, there is a potential treatment which will convince the cell to commit suicide while avoiding collateral damage to healthy cells.

The oncologist replied that I was talking about the "holy grail" of cancer research but he added: "you are not the first person to have this idea".

Why is it necessary to use cloned cells? Why can't they implant an "endogenous" tumour in a rat and then treat it with DCA to see what happens?

These are top-notch doctors and the University of Alberta is a top-notch institution.

Apparently, they are of the opinion that they already have enough evidence of efficacy to move beyond any further investigation involving rats....

You can treat mice with carcinogens etc, and wait for tumors to grow, but this is less reliable, and the tumors will all likely be different in some way. The advantage of using a clonal set of cells (i.e. all grown in a culture system outside of an animal) is that they are fairly similar and so you have a more controlled system to test. If, for example, you have 4 slightly different tumors, 2 succeptible to treatment, and two not, then the average results will likely show no benefit of treatment. The more that you know about the model you use, the better you can isolate the effect of a drug from other random events.

Some would also assert that the idea of re-enabling in cancer cells the cell-apoptosis function associated with healthy mitochondria is pretty new and downright revolutionary.

As for the cancer-research donation, the folks at buydca.com are charging a pittance anyway vis-a-vis any other cancer-fighting drug. To expect them to do what they do without any remuneration at all is, I suspect, for above any restrictions that you place upon your own activities....

Incomingduck - I think that it is necessary to be cynical in respect to all new treatments, and those that push them. I think that everybody would like to help treat cancers in some way, but doing it safely and in a way by which effectiveness can accurately be measured is the key here.