I disagree with that statement. Aspirin has been on the market for years as well as a generic version of just about every other drug.
Producing a known product without investing a lot of money in research is really a good thing. It takes all the guess work out of recouping investment.
My MS Thesis project is looking at digoxin among other drugs as a treatment/ prophylactic/adjunct therapy for certain types of cancer. The phenomenon of digoxin preventing or reducing the malignant properties of cancer have been known since 1977 (Stenkvist, re: breast cancer), and there’s nothing preventing an MD from prescribing dig off-lable if he/she felt comfortable doing so for that or other cancers. There are a number of other drugs that may similarly affect other types of cancer. Cell cultures are the first place to start (you have to start somewhere), and can eventually lead to animal studies and then human trials if the biochemistry works out right between in vitro and in vivo methods. Right now, there’s a couple of human trials going on at our cancer center here involving other drugs that have traditionally been used for other diseases.
As far as DCA goes, one of my Molecular Tox profs said that the dose often makes the poison: low doses may act beneficially, but higher doses may be toxic. The heavy metal arsenic as an FDA approved treatment of a particular type of leukemia is an example. DCA might be effective at concentrations below what’s needed to create liver toxicity, but more research is needed to tease that out. Even if DCA is not effective on its own, it may be effective when used in conjunction with traditional chemotherapeutic drugs, and resulting in lower amounts of chemo drugs needed to kill a certain percentage of cancer cells. A lot more work needs to be done with DCA as well as with other drugs (including digoxin) to prove their effectiveness or demonstrate their ineffectiveness.
Vlad/Igor
Stupid question, if it’s been around since 77 why are they just now exploring it?
I appreciate the reporting of this zombie.
Since it’s not all that old, and the revival contains new information, I’m going to let it go.
IMHO because Stenkvist first noted it as an epidemiological phenomenon. He published some histological slides shortly after that, but it didn’t really take off until he published a 20 year follow-up in 1999. Since then, a lot more people have been looking at digoxin and related cardenolides. I think, too, there was a paradigm shift in those 20 years away from new, sexy drugs to ones that we already know about that work in ways we don’t know about. Interestingly, some naturally occuring drugs with a steroid nucleus have been used in Asia for hundreds of years to treat cancer, but our examination of them has been very recent. When a researcher comes across a new phenomenon, it’s often very seductive and prevents that researcher from pursuing other avenues of inquiry. Plus, funding agencies like the NIH don’t fund discovery work - they fund continuation of previous discoveries.
Vlad/Igor