Great article. Here's a summary (or at least how I understood it) for those that don't read it (which I recommend you do):
* Mitochondrias (an organele in our cells that is considered the battery of a cell) in cancer patients typically don't function as they normally should.
* In 2007, University of Alberta researchers led by Evangelos Michelakis, announced a non-human trial that showed promising signs of stopping and regressing cancer using a substance known as DMC.
* DMC is thought to work by fixing bad mitochondrias in cancer patients (obviously over simplified).
* DMC is non-patentable and is easily made, so the news became a big anti-big-pharma story and spread like wild fire because the researchers were having trouble getting funds for doing clinical trials, since there was no money that could be made from this drug if it proved to work.
* The hopes for many cancer patients skyrocketed creating demand for DMC.
* A few ethically challenged entrepreneurs setup websites to sell DMC under the guise of DMC for Pets to get around FDA.
* There are potential side-effects when DMC is mixed with other drugs so a lot of people put their their lives in danger by doing self treatment, but no results were ever posted to the forums. The suspected reason is that the forum admins removed all negative reports.
* The websites were shut down by FDA after some time.
* A couple days ago, Michelakis's team at UofA announced the results of a clinical trial in which they administered DMC to 5 patients. This published in a journal but you can see their announcement at http://www.dca.med.ualberta.ca/Home/Updates/2010-05-12_Updat...
* Of the 5, patient #1, #2 & #5 showed promising results. Patient #3 died (not attributed to DMC) and patient #4 needed a 2nd surgery 3 months after starting, which it didn't specifically say but I assumed to mean that it wasn't considered successful.
* Key things to note:
- the trials where a combination of phase 0
and phase 1 trials.
-- Phase 0 = seek to determine if the drug
is doing biochemically what it is expected
to do based on preclinical studies, usually
by taking a biopsy and doing chemical tests.
-- Phase 1 "are designed to determine two things:
dose and dose-limiting side effects" ...
not efficacy of the drug.
- all 5 were treated differently and in
combination with other treatments.
This makes the tests not reliable
enough to make conclusions from.
- Treatments often show very very promising
signs when dealing with non-humans but fail
when the rubber meets the road in real
clinical trials.
- DMC shows promise but it's dangerous for
people to self-treat and inefficient to
shortcut the scientific process of testing
and evaluating treatments.