[chromano]

You know what is interesting? In the city I currently live (São Carlos, an inner city in the state of São Paulo, Brasil), there's a 20 years old research that is helping victims of cancer with a new drug. The idea is pretty simple, but unfortunately I don't have a source in english, so the following is in portuguese:

http://www.jornalciencia.com/saude/mente/5372-brasileiro-ter...

Here's the interesting part though, the Brazilian government and even ANVISA (Brazilian Health Surveillance Agency) are not giving a fuck about his discovery, thus the researcher is covering the costs of fabrication of drug and giving it away for free.

Thousands of people from all the country is coming to my city for this drug -- people who used it before says it is a miracle, it really works.

I guess the media can help pressing the government/ANVISA, and it is what is already happening (very slowly though). I hope this text I'm writing spread his discovery further and someway reach someone who can help us. I'm here for whatever questions you have and I will do my best in answering them.

Please share.

[JoeAltmaier]

This sounds exactly like every quack scam out there. The mean old medical authorities are ignoring me! They must be jealous. Yeah, that's it.

[msandford]

This is also a well documented phenomena in the US if the compound isn't patent-able. You gotta get the $50mm to get it through the FDA from somewhere, and if there are no patents there's literally zero years before the generics come out.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140925/08202528637/crowd...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dichloroacetic_acid

So if this guy doesn't want to play ball with a pharmaceutical company, it's entirely likely that his research could go under-reported or under-utilized for many years.

Now of course, these facts don't MAKE his story true. Just that your offhand dismissal of the possibility of it being true isn't quite so rock solid.

[chromano]

Except the researcher is distributing the drug without charging for it. He's not interested in the money.

[facepalm]

How does he finance his operation?

[chromano]

He has more than one research, he even has a factory where he provides materials to a big company here in Brasil. It is irrelevant for this discussion anyways, since it is completely unrelated.

[facepalm]

Well it could have been the case that he still makes money from the drug, just not from directly selling it. People could make donations, or he could give seminars where people pay to learn how to get healthy, or whatever. Or people prefer to do business with him because he has such a good reputation. So it's not irrelevant.

[throwaway1967]

JoeAltmaier you are breaching the negativity rules.

You're just being negative here by willfully ignoring that said doctor is giving the drug away for free, which is not the usual modus operandi of quack doctors.

[JoeAltmaier]

Fair enough. Question: are there rules about posting cancer cures that the powers that be don't want you knowing about?

[toomuchtodo]

Fun fact. If you're referring to a snake oil salesman in the US with that tag line, he's in a federal prison in Montgomery, AL for the next 7 years.

[gus_massa]

From the article:

> A fosfoetanolamina, atualmente, possui dados experimentais concluídas de fase I, II e III.

The problem with the press coverage is that it has too few information. In this case it sounds too good to be true. Usually the drug is useful against some kind of cancers, but not against others. (For example, useful against fast growing cancers, but not useful against slow growing cancers.) I want a link to the a fase III study to see the relevant information.

Most press coverage have a few success stories, for example someone that had a 20% reduction of the cancer in the last months. (Usually it's a measurement problem, they take two images with slightly different methods, and the second image look smaller.) It's extremely suspicious that this article doesn't even have one of this anecdotes.

[Asbostos]

With at least 10,000 people he must be sitting on an amazing pile of data. Has he published it? If not, why not? If the patients aren't being tracked to check their progress, or at least their identity to find when they die, then his efforts are kind of wasted because nobody will trust anecdotes.

[bsbechtel]

On a completely unrelated note, I just moved to São Carlos, and am looking to connect with the tech community here. Could you contact me via the email in my profile, and we could talk further?

[napsterbr]

Hey, we have a gaming startup here in São Carlos. Happy to go out for a few beers. A place you might like is Bridge Coworking[0], though I do not know them.

Couldn't find your email (it's hidden by default), but you can reach me at renato at hackerexperience dot com.

[0] - http://bridge.sc/

[goshx]

Here is his resume including links to published scientific papers: http://buscatextual.cnpq.br/buscatextual/visualizacv.do?id=K...

[goshx]

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

http://www.nature.com/bjc/journal/v109/n11/full/bjc2013510a....

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0753332213...

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0753332212...

[StartledGoat]

What's the name of the drug? (My Portuguese is non-existent)

[mishakorolev]

My Portuguese is terrible, but enough to parse that. The drug appears to be "fosfoetanolamina sintética" or synthetic Phosphorylethanolamine, which its Wikipedia page seems to say that it has anti cancer uses. As I have no bio chem or medical background I can't evaluate that claim.

The article says that it is formed by combining mono -ethanolamine with phosforic acid.

[jdahlin]

English wikipedia is actually quoting a paper[1] co-authored by Gilberto Orivaldo, who is distributing the drug for free.

[1]: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22213293