Sherry A Bradford
AccuTheranostics, Inc., USA
Title: Dichloroacetate (DCA) as an oncology chemotherapeutic agent? What’s all the hype and is it warranted? Complete with clinical outcomes
Biography
Biography: Sherry A Bradford
Abstract
Chemotherapeutic treatment regimens tend to be deleterious and toxic to cancer patients. Thus, today many clinicians are changing their clinical practices opting for targeted and/or ancillary drug treatments that kill the tumor cell populations while sparing healthy cells. Greater than 70% of all cancer types rely on cytosolic aerobic glycolysis for energy production, an inefficient means of generating ATP rather than mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation resulting in an acidic microenvironment conducive to their growth and proliferation. DCA inhibits Pyruvate Dehydrogenase Kinase (PDK) thereby increasing influx of pyruvate into the mitochondria, promoting glucose oxidation, reversing the suppressed mitochondria thus promoting apoptosis in cancer cells. Thus, it would be reasonable to propose that cancer cells would likely be sensitive DCA. Therefore, a prospective study of the efficacy of DCA as a potential chemotherapeutic agent was conducted.