Update on Cancer Treament

Today, Dr. Evangelos Michelakis posted a letter on the University's site:

Dear Friends:

Let me first express my heart felt thanks for all of your support. Our entire team has been overwhelmed with your messages of encouragement and hope. We have also heard many stories of heartbreak and loss which serve to accentuate the sense of urgency to find a viable and more humane treatment for cancer. Your support is helping us to move this important work forward.

The research plan for clinical trials, testing DCA as a cancer treatment in human beings, is complex and requires careful planning. We are aware that each day the research is delayed greatly impacts those of you who are living with cancer and those of you caring for someone with cancer. It’s been a mere six weeks since our initial results have been published and we now await approval of our research plan from Health Canada. The approval process will take a number of weeks and possibly months. We will continue to update the website when there are significant developments.

We are optimistic that we will be able to launch the trials within a matter of months, a process that normally takes several years. We are enjoying the support of the University of Alberta Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry and the Alberta Cancer Board, and help from people like you, makes us confident that we will at least succeed in completing this first trial. By itself, taking a drug from the laboratory all the way to completing a clinical trial, is a tremendously difficult process that is almost never completed without the direct support of pharmaceutical industry.

I want to thank all of you who have made contributions to the research fund. We’ve received generous donations, both small and large, from all over the world - from Canada, the USA, China, Holland, Australia, Greece, India, the Philippines and the UK. These funds, almost $100,000, have already helped us secure some of the supplies that we require. However, for the initial research in humans to start, we need to achieve our fundraising goal of $1.5 million. We need this groundswell of support from our global community to grow to insure our success.

On behalf of myself and the Steering Committee for the DCA study, I want to thank you for your caring support and generosity.

Yours truly,

Dr. Evangelos Michelakis

This is great news! I'll keep you guys in the know, considering this site doesn't have an much needed RSS feed!