3-bromopyruvate - Dr. Young Ko

Newfoundland77 · New User Joined: 30 Aug 2005 Posts: 1

Hello everyone,

I'm a brand new member here - I'm wondering who is aware of the work of Dr. Young Ko, a researcher at John Hopkins University who has successfully eradicated (and I mean eradicated!) advanced liver cancer in 19 lab rats without harming healthy tissue. She has been working with an inexpesive compound called 3-bromopyruvate. This woman has made an incredible discovery but her work is being impeded by power struggles within the school's senior staff. Cancer patients and their families need to know this and we need to start making some noise. My mother has been battling metastatic liver cancer for 14 months now - this treatment could potentially cure her.

Here is an article on Young Ko's work and current struggle:

http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1124787912428

Does anyone here know of this work and can anyone suggest ways to support Young Ko en masse?

Wishing us all strength and courage,
D. Payne

mikes · Senior User Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 143

This is the first I have heard of 3-bromopyruvate. The type of behavior being implicated at Johns Hopkins is indicative of what I was communicating to Leo last evening in my post under "The War On Cancer" in this subforum when I said: "Also, their institutional environment was not always conducive to productive thought. "

While there are people dying of disease, with no hope of cure, these people are bickering amongst themselves. This discourages people like Dr. Ko from moving forward with new discoveries and making real progress against cancer.

It appears from the link you gave that this treatment may or may not be ready for human trials.

What I cannot understand is why someone cannot try it before the trials if they are willing to sign some kind of liability waiver. The only reason that I can think of is that the laws and regulations were written under the pressure of lobbyists from the "Cancer Industry" in such a way to discourage independent studies and to favor lengthy and expensive trials and approval processes. This is easy for the big guys and impossible for independents.

Otherwise, Dr. Ko could just "pick up her marbles" and introduce the treatment herself.

From what was indicated in your link, Dr. Ko has the knowledge to move forward with the treatment, but is being impeded by her environment. And without the backing of a large research facility or a pharmaceutical company, she has no chance of success.

Keep us posted and good luck.

ScottM · New User Joined: 13 Sep 2005 Posts: 3

Hi Everyone,

I am a researcher in the diagnostics sector and I was a colleague of Dr. Ko's back in Washington State University. I can speak for both her integrity and her scientific abilities. She is not only one of the most dedicated scientists that I've ever had the priveledge to know, but she is one of the few researchers who really cares. This is why she did not hesitate to put her entire career in jeopardy for the sake of her research.
Although it is of course too early to know if 3-BrPA will work in humans, it is of course exactly that question that should be under examination right now. Unfortunately the way in which Johns Hopkins is stifling her research, while egregious, is not unique. The problem is much bigger than JHU or any single university. The system is broken from top to bottom. First, let me apologize in advance for the length of this posting, but even at this length, I can barely touch on what needs to be said.
Anyone who knows a little bit about the current state of cancer treatments knows that with a few limited exceptions (eg. Gleevec), cancer treatment has changed very little since the 1970s. The cytotoxic agents used in chemotherapy are the same, and unfortunately the 5-year survival times for most cancers have also remained unchanged. But it isn?t only cancer. Remember ?Jerry?s kids?? There has not been one single drug to help those children with muscular dystrophy since the start of that famous telethon. Not one. They still die the same inevitable horrible deaths. Lou Gehrig?s Disease? Not one new treatment since the 1970s. Alzheimer?s Disease, cystic fibrosis, Huntington?s Disease, scleroderma, pemphigus, myelofibrosis, pulmonary fibrosis, malaria, CJD, polycystic kidney disease, the list goes on and on. For all of these terrible diseases (as well as many others) there has been absolutely no treatment advances in 30 years. Furthermore, there have been virtually no new antibiotics (or any other anti-bacterial agents) developed in the last 30 years. This despite the ominous problem of antibiotic-resistant strains. New vaccines? Nothing.
What makes this particularly exasperating is that the last thirty years has seen the most incredible advances in our understanding of molecular biology and our ability to manipulate life at the molecular level. Many refer to it as ?the biochemical revolution?. In the 1960s they cracked the DNA code. In the 1970s and 1980s we learned how to manipulate DNA (to ?clone? genes) and we worked out the molecular basis for most of the process of life. No period in history ever has, or probably ever will, see advances in our understanding of how life works than the last 30-40 years. Never have we learned so much and never have we had so little to show for it. While molecular science has advanced more than any other (except computer technology), medicine has stood still.
Although this is true only in the treatment area. Diagnostics has advances leaps and bounds. In other words, we are getting better at telling you what will kill you, but we still can?t do anything about it.
So why is this true? The system is broken at every level. It would take many pages to do the problem justice, but I will try to summarize:

1) Corporate Medicine
In modern America, only corporations develop drugs. And there are very few of them. Even though your tax dollars are spent by universities to do the basic research, the few
remaining mega-corporations involved decide which drugs get developed and which don?t. It is a very ?bottom-line? decision and saving people?s lives doesn?t enter in to it. They will not develop any new drug that?s not patentable (hence the death knell for 3-bromopyruvate) and they almost never develop a drug unless it will be taken by a patient continuously for years. Hence drugs like vioxx and lipitor. The pharmaceutical industry figured out years ago that there is much more profit in ineffectively ?managing? a disease than there ever would be in curing it.

2) Academia
The academic sector has been corrupted by the same enormous amounts of money that corrupted the drug companies, only in a different way. Most of the money going in to academic research is for so-called ?basic research?. That is, research designed to understand the basic ?nuts and bolts?. Although this is necessary it has come to the point where this is basically the only research that academia does. Dr. Ko?s research is the proverbial exception that proves the rule. Almost all the tax money as well as almost all the money from cancer foundations and other disease-fighting charities goes to this type of research. The result is that our academic institutions NEVER produce a cure for anything, or even get close. Under the current system, they never will. For example, this week?s big break through was the announcement of the sequencing of the chimpanzee genome, and how that will eventually lead to wonderful cures. Everything done in academia will ?eventually? lead to great cures. Only ?eventually? never comes. However, what does come is money. Lots of money. Professors and especially administrators get rich accepting tax money as well as corporate money for their buildings and esoteric research while leaving the ?applied? research to someone else.
That ?someone else? is the same pharmaceutical industry mentioned above.

3) Government
The FDA exists to ensure that drugs are safe and effective. But these days corporations give massive amounts of money to the very officials who regulate them. When the FDA is not ignoring the dangers of new drugs and devices, it is putting obstacles in the way of possible treatments for terminal diseases. The dirty little secret with vioxx is NOT that it?s dangerous. The danger would be considered minimal if the drug was worth anything, but it?s not. It?s not one iota more effective than ibuprofen, but since it?s patented, it?s infinitely more expensive. Imagine that: Merck making billions of dollars off a drug no better than aspirin. This is the business model the pharmaceutical industry has adopted and the main focus of the FDA is to facilitate this process.
Meanwhile the Orphan Drug Act is essentially dead and the FDA?s bureaucracy still means it takes years to get a drug approved, even for terminally ill people who only have months to live. They simply don?t contribute enough money to the politicians who appoint the FDA officials.

What?s the Solution??

It is not enough to get involved. You must get angry. Everyone must understand that this situation will continue for years, maybe even decades unless priorities are completely changed. Right now, no politician even talks about curing cancer, or anything else for that matter. It?s on the bottom of their list of campaign priorities. Those who hold the most potential to affect a change are the charitable organizations. They must be pressured to only spend their money on research directly related to treatments. Not basic research that might lead to something 20 years from now or will help build an impressive new building at a university. (This is not to put down the importance of basic research, it is merely calling for balance by putting applied research back into academia). If these organizations decided to use their funding power to ensure that those who receive their funding are working directly on treatments and then held them accountable for tangible results, this would start to change things.
But more than anything, we need a ?Manhattan Project? for medicine. If the federal and state governments decided to put billions of dollars towards directly finding treatments for diseases in the manner of the Manhattan project or the race to the moon, it would not only stimulate the economy by supporting thousands of high paying jobs, but we might even find a cure for something. But until politicians, academicians and researchers make finding treatments for disease a national priority, the elusive cure for cancer will always be ?someday?.

Cindy · Senior User Joined: 01 Dec 2004 Posts: 156

Amen, amen & amen.
_________________
Where is the cure???
www.truefacesofbreastcancer.org
www.diepbreastreconstruction.org
www.bcsisters.org/forum
www.mybreastcancerstore.com

pbj11 · Site Admin Joined: 12 May 2007 Posts: 1265

The caveat here, as always, is that something that looks good in a petri dish or in a lab animal, may not have any practical effect on a human being. I can't begin to tell you the huge numbers of "promising" treatments that have fallen by the wayside due to the above.

That being said --- hope springs eternal and there is always that ONE chance that something new WILL be discovered.

I respectfully beg to differ with the prior poster on new developments in the treatment field. Obviously breast cancer death rates have fallen to the point that they are now in the 85% survivorship category, but much of that is due to early detection and on a cellular level much of it is easier to treat than some other cancers. Lung cancer has become the largest cancer killer in the U.S. for both women and men. As little research funding actually goes to lung cancer for the numbers affected, there have still been new agents approved in just the last 3-4 years -- Alimta, Avastin, and the EGFR novel targeted agent Tarceva.

It's certainly not a perfect system, by any means, and the supposed "War on Cancer" introduced under the Nixon Administration seems a joke to those who are fighting and dying from cancer.

Nano-technological discoveries seem to hold much hope in the not too distant future.

Best of luck for wherever you are on this journey,
PBJ
_________________
Husband diagnosed with NSCLC Stage IV. (Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer) Fought & lived 2 1/2 years with multiple lines of treatment.

Post describing our battle: http://cancerforums.net/viewtopic.php?t=7026&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0

ScottM · New User Joined: 13 Sep 2005 Posts: 3

Although of course it is true that the vast majority of potential cancer treatments that looked proomising in vitro or in mice turned out to have little benefit in humans, the problem is precisely that there are very few people and institutions that are actually doing that follow up. As I mentioned in the original posting, virtually no one in academia takes it to the next level (looks at the effectiveness in people) unless it's a drug company sponsored study. There are precious few of those, and they are exclusively for extremely expensive, patentable drugs (like the ones pbj11 mentioned).
The drugs that pbj11 mentioned are great examples of the pathetic advances that billions of our dollars have been spent on. First, most of the drugs mentioned have as their target epidermal growth factor receptors. Only a small percentage of cancers will respond to drugs like this. Second, even drugs with other mechanisms such as Alimta (folate anti-metabolite) have minimal benefit for most people. In one study it was shown to increase survival time from 10.9 months to 12.3 months. This is what the corporate medical world would have us accept as significant progress.
Finally, I can virtually guarantee that none of us will see any significant treatments for cancer from the nanotechnology field in our lifetimes.
Again, the point of this posting is not to discourage people or cause despair. The point is to cause anger and outrage at a system designed to give us the most insignificant results possible at the highest possible price.

P.S.: Young, if you're out there, where are you??

ScottM

brainman

I point out that this poll was started in 2005 and that we have gotten off topic (Dr. Young Ko's research at John Hopkins). Could we either get back on topic or start a new one? It is not that I object to the current discussion, but I don't want a topic to be "hijacked". Thank you all for your understanding and cooperation.
_________________
Jim
Site Administrator and long-term cancer survivor
1992 Astrocytoma grade 2, left motor strip
2005 Recurrence this time said to be an Oligodendoglioma grade 3, same location.
My Story Part 1: http://cancerforums.net/viewtopic.php?p=7350
My Story Part 2: http://cancerforums.net/viewtopic.php?t=8029
Blog http://jimhawkinsport.blogspot.com/

ScottM · New User Joined: 13 Sep 2005 Posts: 3

I apologize if we got off topic. For what it's worth, I believe my good friend Dr. Ko (who seems to have disappeared) would approve of the discussion.

What makes it somewhat more germane is that there has been extensive research since Dr. Ko's initial studies that verified her findings. A web search for "bromopyruvate" and "cancer" will bring up many such references at the basic science level. However, seven years after her initial discoveries, there are no clinical trials under way, nor are there any (that I could find) that will commence any time soon. Instead, what scientists are trying to do is to make synthetic bromopyurvate analogs that can be patented (and thus much more valueble). So here we have a detour that will take years of extra research and development in order to maximize profits, while the dirt cheap, off-the-shelf chemical that could be helping people NOW get's tossed aside because it can't be patented by a pharmaceutical company.
I find it particularly interesting that John's Hopkins destroyed Dr. Ko's career supposedly for publishing her results on 3-bromopyruvate too soon and with too much hype. Now science is proving her to be right. Not only that, but by almost single-handedly reviving the dead concept of cancer energetics (killing cancer cells by depriving them of their unique energy needs) Dr. Ko may have made the most important single brakethrough in cancer treatment research in decades. After destroying her for this, they now have the gaul to patent her work (and under different researcher's names).

Scott M.

brainman

Thank you for getting back on topic and for the update. Smile

_________________
Jim
Site Administrator and long-term cancer survivor
1992 Astrocytoma grade 2, left motor strip
2005 Recurrence this time said to be an Oligodendoglioma grade 3, same location.
My Story Part 1: http://cancerforums.net/viewtopic.php?p=7350
My Story Part 2: http://cancerforums.net/viewtopic.php?t=8029
Blog http://jimhawkinsport.blogspot.com/

pbj11 · Site Admin Joined: 12 May 2007 Posts: 1265

Sorry Jim! Big "DOH" for me. I never noticed the original date, but saw an active post and you know how carried away I get on some topics. Embarassed

_________________
Husband diagnosed with NSCLC Stage IV. (Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer) Fought & lived 2 1/2 years with multiple lines of treatment.

Post describing our battle: http://cancerforums.net/viewtopic.php?t=7026&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0

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