Written by Irene Fischer, Markus Horneber, Katja Boehm and the CAM-Cancer Consortium.
Updated August 31, 2010

Dichloroacetate

Does it work?

Several early-phase clinical trials investigating DCA in cancer patients are currently being registered.19

Clinical trials

A phase II trial with five glioblastoma patients recently was conducted by Michelakis et al.8 Three patients received oral DCA as a sole treatment and in two patients it was administered in addition to radiotherapy and temozolomide. All patients tolerated DCA well at a dose of 6.25 mg/kg twice daily over several months. This dose achieved plasma concentrations at values required for the inhibition of pyruvate dehydrogenase kinase. The authors showed that - as hypothesized - the activity of the pyruvate dehydrogenase complex was higher in tumor samples from patients who had received DCA, compared to that measured in tumor tissue resected from the same patient before starting DCA. Four patients had stable diseases 15 months after study onset and were alive at month 18 of the follow-up. The author’s concluded: „With the small number of treated patients in our study, no firm conclusions regarding DCA as a therapy for GBM [glioblastoma] can be made. Our work supports the need for further studies with DCA in GBM, with an emphasis on combination therapy protocols.”

Case reports

Case reports which all suggest benefits associated with the application of DCA in cancer can be found on some websites.20,21 However, the evidence from these reports is weak, as they have not been independently assessed by applying assessment criteria such as the NCI Best Case Series Criteria.22

Citation

Irene Fischer, Markus Horneber, Katja Boehm, CAM-Cancer Consortium. Dichloroacetate [online document]. http://www.cam-cancer.org/CAM-Summaries/Dietary-approaches/Dichloroacetate. August 31, 2010.

Document history

Summary is currently being updated and revised.
Summary first published in August 2010, authored by Irene Fischer, Markus Horneber, Katja Boehm.

References

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