Big drug companies are CONSTANTLY exploring new areas, trust me, they looked into DCA and found it wanting.
I can't personally attest to the amount of R&D dollars spent by pharma on R&D, but it has been EXTENSIVELY studied, just checked out pubmed (gov't funded research).
I have a question. There are loads of cancer charities, such as Cancer Research UK, . Does donating to these make any difference in progressing the research for a cure/treatement or does it not make any serious dent compared to the big pharmas?
Yeah, it does. But mostly because big pharma's actual "research" is pretty slim. Most basic research is done by university professors and their labs, which are then sold, licensed or simply picked up by big pharma.
Basically, big pharma doesn't have much time or money to spend on basic research since it has to run clinical trials and make money.
Hundreds of millions of dollars and years of clinical trials are needed to prove if DCA is effective or not. You can't just say "trust me, they looked into DCA and found it wanting". Looked at it how? Have they done years of clinical trials? did they spend millions in R&D on this?
There have been small clinical trials of DCA conducted already. That data is out. They were not compelling enough to warrant the type of investment you are talking about (multi-year clinical trials).
That's not to say it may not be found effective for some types of cancers in the future. But what it does tell us is that the lack of interest in spending more money on r&d is not some conspiracy by pharma because they can't make money on it, rather, it's because the data just hasn't been that impressive so far.
I can't personally attest to the amount of R&D dollars spent by pharma on R&D, but it has been EXTENSIVELY studied, just checked out pubmed (gov't funded research).
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=dichloroacetate
If DCA were an effective agent, they would have handed the U of A a handsome check for that use patent. They didn't, so what does that tell you?