Clinical trials
oracknows | May 14, 2007Be careful what you ask for; you just might get it.
I say this in light of a commenter, who decided to show up in one of my old posts to claim "positive results" from dichloroacetate (DCA), the small molecule experimental cancer drug that has shown promising activity in rat models of cancer but has not yet been subjected to testing in human trials, and invite me to check out new testimonials. Because DCA is a small molecule that is inexpensive to produce and can't itself be patented (although a patent for its use in treating cancer, a weaker form of patent, is possible), pharmaceutical…
terrasig | May 12, 2007Via my colleague, PharmCanuck, comes news of an in-depth radio program on dichloroacetate (DCA) that aired this past Tuesday on CBC's, "The Current." As a reminder to readers who aren't already bored senseless of my discussion of this chemical, DCA is a small molecule freely-available in the public domain that was shown to slow the growth of human lung tumors implanted in rats by researchers at the University of Alberta. I've posted on this issue a number of times and have been well outposted by my surgical oncology blogging colleague, Orac at Respectful Insolence.
(Real Audio segment: 21:…
oracknows | May 10, 2007A common refrain among practitioners and advocates of alternative medicine is that the reason randomized clinical trials frequently fail to find any objective evidence of clinical efficacy for their favorite woo is because, in essence, science is not the right tool to evaluate whether it works. In essence, they either appeal to other ways of knowing, invoke postmodernist nonsense claiming that science is just one way of knowing that is not any better than any other ways, or both. The most outrageously absurd example of postmodernist silliness in this regard that I've ever seen was the…
oracknows | May 8, 2007In rapid succession after the last pontificating and bloviating article claiming that there will never be a cure for cancer because it would be too financially disastrous to the medical economy, I've been made aware of another pontificating and bloviating article decrying the state of cancer research today, entitled Curing Cancer: Running on Vapor, Remedy: More Brainpower, Less Hype, by George L. Gabor Miklos, Ph.D. and Phillip J. Baird, M.D., Ph.D. On first glance, it looks like a bold proposal for a necessary change of direction in our cancer research effort. Sadly, it doesn't deliver on…
oracknows | May 7, 2007Readers who don't like me might think that the title of this post refers to what I am about to write. I know, the title perfectly encapsulates the verbose style that is my stock and trade. In reality, though, it's referring to a couple of articles floating around the blogosphere of which I've become aware and about which I've been meaning discuss because of their similarities. One is a pretty worthless piece of conspiracy-mongering; the other, although it makes some appropriate criticisms of how we go about cancer research, comes to a wildly incorrect conclusion about what we should be doing…
terrasig | May 1, 2007Today's edition of the NCI Cancer Bulletin features another natural product clinical trial, this time for depsipeptide in T-cell lymphoma.
Depsipeptide (Romidepsin or FR901228) is an early histone deacetylase inhibitor isolated from fermentation of Chromobacterium violaceum. Several histone deacetylase inhibitors are in clinical trials for various cancers and many are derived from natural products. However, the first HDAC inhibitor approved by FDA is a synthetic compound, SAHA or vorinostat (Zolinza), also for T-cell lymphoma.
What is it about T-cell lymphoma that attracts the development…
oracknows | May 1, 2007There are times when, as a scientist, I look at an idea and its execution and simply stand in awe. It's particularly satisfying when it's a relatively simple idea that could conceivably do a lot of good for a lot of patients. Oddly enough, whether it's because I've been out of the loop or because it hasn't garnered that much attention in the blogosphere (not even here in ScienceBlogs), but I only just heard of it now. It's a new drug in phase II clinical trials that has the potential to obviate or reverse the effects of a wide variety of genetic mutations that cause human disease:
A pill that…
oracknows | April 12, 2007If you ever want to wonder why I'm sometimes of the mind that the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine should be disbanded and its functions distributed among the other Institutes of the NIH, you just have to consider the sorts of woo-filled studies (like the Gonzalez protocol) funded by NCCAM mixed in among the more reasonable studies of herbal remedies and other modalities that have at least a modicum of scientific plausibility. With that in mind, I came across a study that seems to be getting a fair amount of play in the press, at least around here. The study purports…
oracknows | April 11, 2007It's been a couple of weeks since we last checked in with The DCA Site, that dubious advertising site for BuyDCA.com, where a chemist named Jim Tassano sells to desperate cancer patients non-pharmaceutical grade and non-FDA-approved dichloroacetate, the small molecule chemotherapeutic agent with an interesting and unusual mechanism of action that has shown promise in rat models of cancer but as yet has not undergone clinical trials in humans to determine if it is effective in cancer. Based on a lot of hype by the credulous and proudly ignorant, a lot of distrust of big pharma (some justified…
terrasig | April 2, 2007A bad day for pharma on the newswires:
Pfizer subsidiaries agree to pay $34.7 million in fines
Two subsidiaries of Pfizer Inc. have agreed to pay fines totaling $34.7 million for offering a kickback to recommend company drugs and for illegally promoting the human growth hormone product Genotropin for non-approved uses, federal prosecutors announced Monday. Prosecutors allege that Pharmacia & Upjohn Co. Inc. offered to overpay a subsidiary of a pharmacy benefit manager by $12.3 million in the hope the company would, in turn, recommend Pharmacia's drug products to its clients.
Pharmacy…
oracknows | March 28, 2007It's been a week since I last wrote about dichloroacetate (DCA), the chemotherapeutic agent that targets tumor cells by an interesting new mechanism based on the Warburg effect, as I've described in the past. After a very interesting article in Cancer Cell in January by investigators at the University of Alberta, the blogosphere erupted with wild speculation that this was a "cure" for cancer, based only on animal studies that were fairly impressive. Because DCA is a small molecule that is supposedly "unpatentable," pharmaceutical companies have been rather cool in their interest, and it is…
terrasig | March 25, 2007I noted just last week the latest review by Drs Newman and Cragg citing that nature remains the source of 70% of prescription drugs. Wall Street Journal medical reporter Ron Winslow took his turn yesterday contributing to the paper's new HealthBlog from New Orleans, site of the American College of Cardiology meeting.
Turns out that a semi-synthetic analog of a compound derived from the bark of Australian magnolia may enhance anti-clotting therapy following stent implants without increasing bleeding risks. The parent molecule and the analog tested in this trial act as antagonists, or…
oracknows | March 21, 2007Late yesterday afternoon, I was lazily checking my referral logs to see who might be linking to Respectful Insolenceâ¢, as most bloggers like to do from time to time (and any blogger who claims otherwise is probably feeding you a line), when I noticed a fairly large number of visits coming from one location, namely here. I was wondering when this would happen, but it looks as though the regulars at The DCA Site have finally noticed some of my writing. Surprisingly, what they say about me is not that bad, although that's probably because they seem to have found the least--shall we say?--…
oracknows | March 20, 2007Although I've been blogging alot about dichloroacetate, the small molecule chemotherapeutic agent that has shown promise against a variety of cancers in preclinical animal tumor models, but I'm not the only one. Fellow ScienceBlogger Abel Pharmboy, whose knowledge of pharmacology surpasses my own, has also been on the case and has produced some articles worth checking out:
The dichloroacetate (DCA) cancer kerfuffle
Where to buy dichloroacetate...
Local look at dichloroacetate (DCA) hysteria
Edmonton pharmacist asked to stop selling dichloroacetate (DCA)
Four days, four dichloroacetate (DCA)…
oracknows | March 20, 2007The longer I maintain this blog, the more I find unexpected (to me, at least) intersections and relationships between various topics that I write about. Of course, a lot of it simply has to do with the fact that one of the overarching themes of this blog is skepticism and critical thinking, which leads one to seek patterns in various pseudoscience, but sometimes it's a little more interesting than that. For example, a couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post about the "individualization" of treatments in "alternative" medicine and how it's largely a sham that alt-med practitioners claim that their…
oracknows | March 6, 2007Last week, I wrote a quick and (semi-) facetious piece about how my colleague and I are sweating to the NIH payline, as we wait to find out whether our R01 application will be funded or not. With its being rumored that National Cancer Institute (NCI) paylines will be in the range of the 12th percentile, it's going to be really, really tight whether we make it below that line or not, although my colleague's being a new PI will certainly help.
Wouldn't you know it that Writedit, the blogger whose excellent and highly useful blog, Medical Writing, Editing & Grantsmanship I discovered and…
oracknows | March 6, 2007One byproduct of blogging that I had never anticipated when I started is how it sometimes gets me interested in scientific questions that I would never have paid much attention to before or looked into other than superficially. One such scientific question is whether dichloroacetate (DCA), the small molecule that was shown to have significant anti-tumor activity against human tumor xenografts implanted in rats, media reports about which caused a blogospheric hysteria in late January representing DCA as a "cure" for cancer that "big pharma" doesn't want you to know about, mainly because it's…
oracknows | February 22, 2007I've probably beat this one into the ground over the last couple of days; so this will be uncharacteristically brief, because it's time to move on. Also, it was fun to see DaveScot go into paroxysms to try to justify the dangerous, unethical, and reckless actions of Heather Nordstrom and her stepfather in setting up The DCA Site and its sister site, BuyDCA.com, where Heather et al are selling "Pet-DCA" in a ludicrously obvious (and probably ineffective) ploy to be able to claim to the FDA, "Hey, we're not selling this for human consumption." One wonders, perhaps, if DaveScot may actually have…
oracknows | February 21, 2007Yesterday, I wrote about how anti-science pro-"intelligent design" kook extraordinaire Dave Springer (a.k.a. DaveScot) has taken to promoting dichloroacetate as a treatment for cancer and one website in particular, The DCA Site that claims to exist to "help inform people of the exciting research done on DCA [dichloroacetate] by scientists at the University of Alberta. In January 2007 a team of scientists at the University of Alberta published a paper in the scientific journal Cancer Cell describing the discovery that a simple, cheap molecule, DCA, worked to reactivate the apoptosis mechanism…
oracknows | February 20, 2007I hadn't planned on writing about dichloroacetate, the inexpensive compound whose success in treating experimental cancer in rats that provoked a blogopheric storm about a "cancer cure" that would supposedly never see the light of day because it's not patentable. After all, I've done about seven posts on the topic, give or take a couple, in the course of the last four weeks or so. That's saturation blogging, and, really, nothing new has happened on the news front that merits a new post.
Or so I thought.
Then, like Michael Corleone in The Godfather, Part III, just when I thought that I was out…