Discovery is that instant between ignorance and the obvious, between not knowing, or not caring about something and realising that whatever it is, it is something really, really, important and is something so obvious that you could kick yourself for not appreciating it before.

All discoveries have the knack, once discovered, of seeming obvious, simple common sense, so obvious in fact that those who make discoveries are often soon forgotten by those who come afterwards.

This preamble is not about to be followed by something so earth shattering that the very planet will pause in its rotation to admire it. Humanity is a discovering animal one of whose few redeeming features is its curiosity. We are natural stick pokers into the seaside pool of creation, forever interested in what lies under the next unturned stone. We are curious about absolutely everything, and although often our curiosity is too easily satisfied or our interest deflected, we are capable of the most amazing insights and leaps of the imagination.

Much of what is discovered is ignored or lost or pigeon-holed as "interesting - but let's find something that will make us some money". For example, are you aware that researchers in Canada may well have discovered a drug that could reverse, even cure, many forms of killer cancer? No. Probably not. Why should you be? Not only is this drug already prescribed for other conditions, it is so cheap to make that the greatest doubt is that any drug company will spend the money on the very expensive clinical trials. Why should they? If it works they can't patent it or profit from it?

But this example illustrates the process of discovery superbly. Scientists have for long known that cancer cells survive because they "turn off" the normal mechanisms of cell death ("apoptosis"), thus surviving when normally the body would detect abnormalities within them and destroy them. Within every cell, both plant and animal, there exists a little machine which produces energy by chemically converting the various sugars into compounds which power the cells other processes. This little machine is called a mitochondria, and only when a cell has a working mitochondria can it die a "natural death" if the cell is in some way damaged or malfunctioning.

But cells can produce energy, and so survive, by another method which does not depend upon the mitochondria, and this is what happens in cancerous cells. They become immune to the normal processes of cell death and continue to grow and multiply, using the alternative energy route, ultimately spreading around the body of the host and finally killing it. Scientists have for a long time known all this but said "so what? - the mitochondrial damage and the resulting change of energy generation mechanism and cancerous cell growth, are because that is what cancer cells do - what can we do about it?" and have concentrated on other ways of killing the cancerous cells, many of which are themselves potentially very damaging to the organism such as chemotherapy and radiation.

But then along come some clever chaps in Toronto and ask a simple question - what would happen if we can turn the mitochondrial enery generation back on - would the cancer cells become vulnerable again to the bodies immune systems? In other words, have we been confusing cause and effect? Does the cancer cause the closing down of the mitochondrial engine or is closing down of the engine enabling the cancer to utilise an alternative enery generation and growth mechanism allowing it to grow and spread?

Well the answer appears to be yes, if you reactivate the mitochondrial engine, the cancer stops, and as far as can be seen, begins to retreat. Turning the mitochondrial engine back on enables the normal processes of cell death to take place.

Is is a cure for all cancers? Who knows? We can but hope, but if the clinical trials of what is already known to be a very safe and existingly licensed (for other conditions) medicine, fulfill the promise of the early results, it may offer a much safer, less side-effects treatment within a very short time. Providing of course that these very same trials can be funded.

The drug by the way is a very simple chemical compound called sodium dichloracetate, oddly enough already prescribed for people with a relatively rare hereditary condition in which the patients cells are not able to use the mitochondrial engines to generate enough energy.

Finally I must apologise in advance for any errors explaining how this discovery was made or in the way that it works. I have deliberately avoided using as much of the scientific terminology as possible, and I am not a biochemist or biologist, so don't get picky about the details. But if the guys in Toronto are right, well folks, 2007 has already started with a very good reason to be cheerful. Lets hope it saves some lives in the very near future.

If you are interested in such things the paper was in recent copy of Nature and its title and the folks who deserve the credit are:

A Mitochondria-K+ Channel Axis Is Suppressed
in Cancer and Its Normalization
Promotes Apoptosis and Inhibits Cancer Growth
Se´ bastien Bonnet,1 Stephen L. Archer,1,2 Joan Allalunis-Turner,3 Alois Haromy,1 Christian Beaulieu,4
Richard Thompson,4 Christopher T. Lee,5 Gary D. Lopaschuk,5,6 Lakshmi Puttagunta,7 Sandra Bonnet,1
Gwyneth Harry,1 Kyoko Hashimoto,1 Christopher J. Porter,8 Miguel A. Andrade,8 Bernard Thebaud,1,6
and Evangelos D. Michelakis1,*
1Pulmonary Hypertension Program and Vascular Biology Group
2Department of Physiology
3Department of Oncology
4Department of Biomedical Engineering
5Department of Pharmacology
6Department of Pediatrics
7Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology
University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB T6G 2B7, Canada
8 Ontario Genomics Innovation Centre, Ottawa Health Research Institute, and Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine,
University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON K1N 6N5, Canada