Has a Cure for Cancer Been Found? Some Researchers in Canada Think They Have

This is not the normal fare for the CH 2.0, but I found it interesting.  Dominique, from 4 Walls and a View, posted this on her Facebook page yesterday, so I thought I might share it, and see what kind of reaction it generated.  The gist of the story is simple, Canadian researchers have claimed that they can, in essence, cure several types of cancer.  Given the potential bombshell that this claim is, it ought to be examined.  So, here is an excerpt, from Signs of the Times…

Researchers at the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, Canada have cured cancer last week, yet there is a little ripple in the news or in TV. It is a simple technique using very basic drug. The method employs dichloroacetate, which is currently used to treat metabolic disorders. So, there is no concern of side effects or about their long term effects. 
This drug doesn’t require a patent, so anyone can employ it widely and cheaply compared to the costly cancer drugs produced by major pharmaceutical companies. 
Canadian scientists tested this dichloroacetate (DCA) on human’s cells; it killed lung, breast and brain cancer cells and left the healthy cells alone. It was tested on Rats inflicted with severe tumors; their cells shrank when they were fed with water supplemented with DCA. The drug is widely available and the technique is easy to use, why the major drug companies are not involved? Or the Media interested in this find? 
In human bodies there is a natural cancer fighting human cell, the mitochondria, but they need to be triggered to be effective. Scientists used to think that these mitochondria cells were damaged and thus ineffective against cancer. So they used to focus on glycolysis, which is less effective in curing cancer and more wasteful. The drug manufacturers focused on this glycolysis method to fight cancer. This DCA on the other hand doesn’t rely on glycolysis instead on mitochondria; it triggers the mitochondria which in turn fights the cancer cells. 
The side effect of this is it also reactivates a process called apoptosis. You see, mitochondria contain an all-too-important self-destruct button that can’t be pressed in cancer cells. Without it, tumors grow larger as cells refuse to be extinguished. Fully functioning mitochondria, thanks to DCA, can once again die. 
With glycolysis turned off, the body produces less lactic acid, so the bad tissue around cancer cells doesn’t break down and seed new tumors. 

You can click the link, and read the rest.
There are also some criticisms…

So many people have sent me this sensationalistic article, “Scientists cure cancer, but no one takes notice ”, that I guess I have to respond. I sure wish it were true, but you should be able to tell from how poorly it is written and the ridiculous inaccuracies (mitochondria are cells that fight cancers?) that you should be suspicious. The radical, exaggerated claims make the truth of the story highly unlikely.
…
The simple summary is this: that claim is a lie. There have been no clinical trials of dichloroacetate (DCA) in cancer patients, so there is no basis for claiming they have a cure; some, but not all, cancers might respond in promising ways to the drug, while others are likely to be resistant (cancer is not one disease!); and there are potential neurotoxic side effects, especially when used in conjunction with other chemotherapies.
So we have one popular account that is badly written and makes exaggerated claims. There is also a university press release , the source for the sloppy popular account, that doesn’t contain the egregious stupidities but does tend to inflate basic research studies into an unwarranted clinical significance. And then, of course, there are the actual peer reviewed papers  that describe the research and rationale, and also the reservations, on DCA. It’s like a game of telephone: you can actually trace the account from the sober science paper to the enthusiastic press release to the web account with its extravagant claims of a simple, cheap cure for cancer, and see how the story is gradually corrupted. It would be funny if the final result wasn’t going to dupe a lot of desperate people.
But there is a germ of truth to the story, in that DCA does have potential. Here’s how it works.
There are two major pathways that we use to extract energy from sugar. One is glycolysis, which extracts two ATP molecules from each molecule of sugar, and doesn’t require oxygen. Then there is glucose oxidation, which as you might guess from the name, does require oxygen, but which takes the byproducts of glycolysis and burns them completely to produce 36 ATP. So there’s the tradeoff: if your cells are oxygen-starved, or hypoxic, they can still get energy from sugar, but it’s relatively inefficient, but if they do have access to oxygen, they can extract much more. This is why you breathe, and why your heart beats, and why you have an elaborate circulatory system to deliver oxygenated blood to your tissues: without oxygen, you suffer a catastrophic hit to the efficiency of energy production.
Another feature of these two energy-producing pathways is that they are in different cellular compartments. Glycolysis takes place in the cytoplasm, while glucose oxidation occurs in the mitochondria. There is a gate-keeping enzyme, pyruvate dehydrogenase kinase (PDK), that regulates the flow of pyruvate, a product of the glycolysis pathway, into the mitochondria for oxidation. If PDK is active, it suppresses the transport of pyruvate into the mitochondria, and the cell is forced to rely on glycolysis, even if oxygen is available. If PDK is inactivated, pyruvate is shuttled into the mitochondria, even if oxygen is low.
This is where DCA comes in. DCA inhibits PDK, forcing cells to use the more efficient form of energy production. That sounds like a strange way to make a cancer cell uncomfortable, but the other factor here is that mitochondria are primary regulators of apoptosis, or cell suicide. They are loaded with sensors and enzymes that react to abnormalities in the cell (like being cancerous!) by activating a self-destruct mechanism. Shut down the mitochondra, you shut down the self-destruct mechanism that polices the cell. So the idea is a little indirect: by goosing the mitochondria, we also wake up the safety switch that, if all goes well, will cause the cell to spontaneously kill itself.

I must admit that I am completely unqualified to judge this, so I thought I’d just put it out there, and see what kind of responses I get.  Also, i know that both the first article, and the rebuttal, are from May of last year.  However, when I did Google dichloroacetate, I found quite a few links on how to purchase it.  Obviously, enough people have heard about it to create a market for it.  So, have at it, and if there are any medical experts in the audience, feel free to chime in.