Apparently, we have a new cure for pancreatic cancer, and a comparison with Antabuse
31. 1. 2026 / Boris Cvek
čas čtení
3 minuty
I am amazed at how much attention has been drawn to the
alleged discovery of a cure for pancreatic cancer by Spanish scientists,
published in the journal PNAS. The scientists showed that their
combination of substances destroys pancreatic tumors in mice. Richard
Harris writes eloquently about the use of mice in biomedicine in his
book Rigor Mortis (a book favorably reviewed in the world's leading
scientific journals Nature and Science). I have summarized it in Czech
here:
However, even if the research in PNAS were truly repeatable and relevant in mice, clinical trials, i.e., trials on humans, would have to continue: Phase 1: safety verification, Phase 2: efficacy verification, Phase 3 (the most expensive): confirmation of efficacy in a large number of patients (terribly expensive).
Clinical trials involve statistical verification of efficacy. The first randomized clinical trial was not conducted until 1946, and even today, most people do not understand how difficult it is to prove that a treatment actually works.
During the covid pandemic, I heard about a doctor who allegedly cured several patients with Antabuse without comparing a control group. Those patients would almost certainly have recovered on their own without any treatment: he could have given them butter, water, or air as medicine and observed that they recovered.
Let's return to cancer. The problem is that even drugs that successfully pass the second phase of clinical trials and are provisionally approved for clinical treatment on that basis (final approval can only be granted after a successful third phase) usually do not prolong life at all (Naci et al. Overall survival benefits of cancer drugs initially approved by the US Food and Drug Administration... Lancet Oncology 2024).
Let's compare this with the aforementioned Antabuse. Its active ingredient, disulfiram, can suppress tumors in mice (specifically breast cancer and multiple myeloma) through a new, clearly proven mechanism (Skrott et al. Nature 20217), with the active ingredient proven effective in mouse tumors at effective concentrations.
We have two phase II clinical trials (phase I is not necessary because Antabuse has been a commonly used drug for alcoholism for decades): one from France in 1993 (Dufour et al. Biotherapy) in women with breast cancer and the other from Israel in 2015 (Nechushtan et al. Oncologist 2015) in people with metastatic lung cancer. Both show that the treatment helps survival.
Survival in the first case is placebo vs. ditiocarb (ditiocarb is formed from Antabuse immediately after ingestion) 55% vs. 81% after five years.
In the second case, no one in the placebo group survived, while in the disulfiram group, 2 out of 20 people survived long-term.
Antabuse can be administered immediately, even legally, to patients in the terminal stage of cancer who have exhausted all standard treatments. There is no blind, randomized phase II or III clinical trial (phase III does not exist at all) that would test the effectiveness of Antabuse against metastatic cancer, except for the two mentioned above, which, completely independently of each other (different times, different cancers, different countries), show an effect, nota bene an effect in the most important aspect: survival.
So what is the problem? The drug is too cheap; treating cancer with Antabuse would be practically free.
Who would want that! How awful! So far, there are only two exceptions where something like this has been achieved, i.e., clinical trials—which are very expensive—have proven that a cheap, unpatentable drug works and can treat people very cheaply.
The first case is paramomycin against whooping cough, the second is dexamethasone against covid-19.
For more on the absurd situation with clinical trials of Antabuse (disulfiram), see:
And for the article in Nature about the discovery of the unique mechanism of action of Antabuse against cancer, see here:
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