Five-Cent Diabetes Pill From 1958 May Be New Cancer Drug

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-09-25/five-cent-diabetes-pill-from-1958-may-be-new-cancer-drug.html

by tshtf • 14 years ago

40 46 14 years ago

Ok, now to protect my health I should be taking this drug (Metformin?), taking aspirin, drinking a glass of wine, eating blueberries... what have I missed? Maybe a pill that combines all that? There's an actionable startup idea!

WiseWeasel• 14 years ago

Gullibitor, for people who don't question all those newspaper headlines about the latest wonder drug breakthrough. Though I will admit blueberry wine sounds like a good idea.

gwern• 14 years ago

Remember the aspirin has to be low-dose...

dmix• 14 years ago

It's not a good idea to take it preemptively. Only take low-dose aspirin if you've been diagnosed with heart problems or likely to have problems in the future.

tptacek5• 14 years ago

You're only going to take metformin if you have risk factors and/or metabolic syndrome/diabetes. Metformin has side effects. It's not as simple as aspirin.

(I'm not on it, but my wife was after our first kid was born and there was a concern about gestational diabetes).

pw• 14 years ago

I might be wrong, but my understanding is that metformin is remarkably safe. I know you shouldn't take it if you have kidney or liver disease, and you mentioned the risk for women who are or might become pregnant, but except in those cases, I think gastrointestinal upset is about the only side-effect.

aptimpropriety2• 14 years ago

FWIW, the dreams of the 'end-all pill' fall short for a wide variety of reasons - one of the major ones being volume of ingredients necessary. For many recommended doses of vitamins / minerals, you simply need more than the total weight of those ingredients than can fit into a pill. The magnitude of this depends upon which supplementation schools of thought you believe in, but there is a limit to how much you can cram into a pill you can swallow.

pyre2• 14 years ago

  Fry: I can't swallow that.
  Prof. Farnsworth: Good news! It's a suppository!

tzs2• 14 years ago

Cool. I'm on metformin (the drug from the article) and Actos for my American Diabetes[1]. Maybe metformin's anti-cancer properties will counter Actos' known pro-cancer properties! :-)

[1] By American Diabetes I mean diabetes due to being overweight. A few years ago, I changed my eating habits, got down to merely chubby, and all traces of diabetes went away. Eventually, changes in work threw my schedule into disarray, I stopped making time to go home and cook and reverted to too much fast food, much of the weight came back, and so did the diabetes.

mahyarm2• 14 years ago

Subway salads & In&Out protein style or McDonalds burgers & milkshakes style fast food?

tzs2• 14 years ago

A mix, although shakes are rare. It's the tempting add-ons (e.g., cookies at Subway) and the late night "I didn't stock any good snacks at home to avoid temptation, and so I end up going to the convenience store" runs that are the killers.

TheAmazingIdiot• 14 years ago

Hmm. So the way I read this:

We have an old drug that helps diabetes to treat cancer.. The drug costs $.05/pill, for diabetes.

It will be called "Nocan", and feature a $24/pill cost, due to a new patent being granted. *

*Just like Eli Lilly with PMS-PMDD and name change of Prozac to Sarafem. All you need do is bribe FDA for new "disease" name, and you have another 17 yr patent.

danielweber2• 14 years ago

Orphan Drug Law. If you want someone to do all the work to actually prove it works, which is incredibly expensive, they must be compensated in some way.

There are certainly other ways to compensate people who do this research, but this way maps pretty well to our current laws.

huxley• 14 years ago

Some drugs are very expensive, but most orphan drugs aren't. Average costs are between $25-60 million per drug.

http://www.palgrave-journals.com/biosoc/journal/v6/n1/full/b...

http://www.cptech.org/ip/health/rnd/evidenceregardingrnd.pdf

tptacek5• 14 years ago

Huh? How do you patent metformin? It's an extremely widely prescribed drug.

stephengillie• 14 years ago

You don't. You patent "Nocan", a drug with an extremely similar (most would say "identical") chemical structure. Metformin is a diabetes medication, while Nocan will be a cancer drug, so they're totally different. The diseases aren't even handled by the same medical specialists. ;)

cowsandmilk• 14 years ago

at least it is a new indication, see the Makena Pricing Controversy to learn about what the Orphan Drug Law allows https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KV_Pharmaceutical#Makena_prici...

timClicks• 14 years ago

It's possible to receive a patent for applying a known drug to a new area.

batgaijin• 14 years ago

Patents are the foundation for knowledge trickle-down-theory.

aptimpropriety2• 14 years ago

A somewhat similar corollary - 'Lovaza', sold by GSK. It contains Omega-3-acid ethyl esters.

Also widely known as fish oil, and is prescribed for the same reasons fish oil is recommended in supplementation. Only difference is fish oil is marginally less concentrated, much cheaper, doesn't have the 'pharma' tag and isn't prescribed.

In the industry it's known as one of the biggest cash cows for GSK - it's earned them many billions.

http://www.omegavia.com/lovaza-vs-fish-oil/

guylhem• 14 years ago

They might as well have called the drug "snake oil". It would have made more sense :-)

rms4• 14 years ago

I've been taking this on and off before meals as an anti-aging drug. Glad it's getting some mainstream coverage. It's quite possible just about everyone should be taking it, certainly everyone on a typical American high-carb diet.

sliverstorm4• 14 years ago

It's quite possible just about everyone should be taking it

Statements like this instantly set off my alarm bells. A drug that everybody should be routinely taking? Call me skeptical.

jrockway2• 14 years ago

We all take powerful drugs every day: it's just that we mostly get them from food. (Example: Vitamin C and scurvy.)

rms4• 14 years ago

I didn't really mean that; I meant something more like "every person that is unusually obsessive about their health and willing to regularly take diagnostic testing that is considered conventionally bad Bayesian medicine at a population level should try Metformin".

So really I meant that everyone should have health care in the top .1% of healthcare available on the planet, but that's a utopia, not reality.

tocomment2• 14 years ago

That's fascinating. How is it supposed to slow aging? Have you noticed anything to indicate it's working for you? Are there any side effects?

rms4• 14 years ago

I've noticed no side effects in low dosages and my A1C has improved but hard to seperate that from other confounding factors. http://www.lef.org/featured-articles/metformin_dosage.html This is at very low dosage, 500mg once per day, but again, on and off, I mostly forgot to take it.

tocomment2• 14 years ago

How does this drug work? Does it reduce your blood sugar somehow? Would it be useful for weight loss?

paulsutter• 14 years ago

Are they saying that controlling blood sugar reduces cancer, or that metformin controls blood sugar -and- reduces cancer through some other mechanism?

There is enormous evidence of health problems caused by high blood sugar. If this applies to cancer too, the actionable plan is to start measuring one's own blood sugar (either daily or with an implant which can do it continuously), and learn to control it. I'm ready to try this myself.

Nothing beats direct measurement / "what gets measures gets fixed".

Five-Cent Diabetes Pill From 1958 May Be New Cancer Drug

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