CANCER: the HIDDEN SCANDAL
Cancer is the most widely feared disease in the world. In the UK alone a cancer patient dies every three minutes. Dr Jones draws attention to a promising lead which has been suppressed for over thirty years.
by Robert Jones MA PhD
No single human affliction has attracted more resources dedicated to its defeat than cancer. In the UK one in three people are diagnosed with the disease, and one in four will die of it. In 2007 the budget of the main charity, Cancer Research UK, ran to £330 million. Despite significant advances in the handling of certain of its forms, no generally applicable treatment has emerged. The classic view still widely held is that the problem is insoluble.
When research into cancer began a century ago, scientists kept their ears close to the ground for useful clues. Even before the 19th century it was known that the cancers of patients who developed erysipelas, a disfiguring bacterial infection which could prove fatal, often regressed and on occasion disappeared. As far back as the 1890s the American doctor William Coley realised that learning from Nature could be rewarding, but over a number of decades investigations dedicated to discovering the mechanism of action led nowhere.
Eighty years after Coley energy production in malignant cells was identified as the vulnerable point of attack. Mediation of the anti-cancer action by the host provided an important lead; hormones were involved, signifying that the effect might be reproducible by pharmacological means. Several non-cytotoxic drugs were found to act in a similar but much less dramatic fashion. Almost all were unsuitable for clinical application. Nonetheless the breakthrough had been made. Clearly more research was essential; yet the Imperial Cancer Research Fund refused to take note of the new principle of cancer destruction.
One of these drugs was the phenothiazine Largactil, already in wide use since the 1950s for the treatment of schizophrenia. Anecdotal reports of beneficial effects in cancer patients treated over a period of time were regarded with extreme scepticism and discounted, but it was clear from a wide assessment published in 1985 of further evidence, including studies of populations given Largactil in mental hospitals, cancer responses in animals, and mechanism of action that the future of successful treatment could lie with this group of drugs. Clearly a clinical trial was called for; but no cancer charity was interested.
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