Simple, cheap and effective drug against cancer discovered

[Karlos]

Which isomer is it? 1,1 or 1,3?

[Karlos]

An even stranger note, there was an article recently describing the action of capsaicin on tumour cells, killing them by the exact opposite behaviour, i.e. shutting down their mitochodria :-?

[Karlos]

:oops:

I actually read it as dichloroacetone, of which there are two possible forms:

ClCH2-(C=O)-CH2Cl or CH3-(C=0)-CHCl2

Incidentally, are you sure it's a radical? I would have thought that dichloroacetate is the anion of the dissociated form of dichloroacetic acid?

(Having just 2 carbon atoms, you could have Chloroacetyl chloride, but as with all acid chlorides that sure as hell doesn't sound very good for you ;-))

[Karlos]

Yes, I used to be one ;-)

A synthetic organic chemist, I mean, not a radical :lol:

-edit-

Probably the reason I read it as "dichloroacetone" is simply because when scan reading it I automatically rejected "dichloroacetate" as a discrete chemical compound. First letter/last letter reading thing, no doubt.

[Karlos]

@Jax

No, I think you'd want a medical doctor, really :-D

-edit-

Thinking about it, it's pretty sloppy for a scientific publication to call a specific chemical compound "chloroacetate". What-chloroacetate? There's an infinite number of esters, amides, anydrides etc. that could contain a chloroacetate functional group.

Tsk...

[Karlos]

Fair enough from a usage perspective, but from a strict chemical perspective there is simply no such compound as "dichloroacetate"; it can't exist on its own to be bottled up and shipped any more than "chloride" or "sulphate" can.

Anyway, that's by the by and I'm clearly being quite anal about it. The important thing is what it is capable of. It's quite ironic when you consider the sheer effort invested in cancer research that answers may lie in some of the simpler substances we've employed for ages for other purposes.

It seems strange that this and capsaicin both appear (as far as the detail in the given reports go) to kill cancer cells by having the opposite effects on their mitochondria.

[Karlos]

I totally agree.

[Karlos]

JaXanim wrote:
@Karlos
I think our avatars have something going here!
JaX

Well, I did get the idea of the blinking eyes from yours ;-) When we had 15,000 bytes per avatar to play with I could be a bit more adventurous, but now a glowing cigar and blink is about all I can squeeze in before I'm reduced to sacrificing the palette to less than 128 colours :-)

[Karlos]

@Quixote

This is one of the reasons I gave up in my original field. My PhD was sponsored by a pharmecutical company that shall remain nameless. Their attitude towards drug research and production was pure corporate gain.

On top of all the dead leads the project was turning up and being faced with the prospect of post doctoral research before I could get a decent R&D job, I figured I'd jump ship whilst I still had some life left in me.