Nearly 30 years after Nobel laureate Linus Pauling famously and controversially suggested that vitamin C supplements can prevent cancer, a team of Johns Hopkins scientists have shown that in mice at least, vitamin C - and potentially other antioxidants - can indeed inhibit the growth of some tumors ¯ just not in the manner suggested by years of investigation.

The conventional wisdom of how antioxidants such as vitamin C help prevent cancer growth is that they grab up volatile oxygen free radical molecules and prevent the damage they are known to do to our delicate DNA. The Hopkins study, led by Chi Dang, M.D., Ph.D., professor of medicine and oncology and Johns Hopkins Family Professor in Oncology Research, unexpectedly found that the antioxidants’ actual role may be to destabilize a tumor’s ability to grow under oxygen-starved conditions. Their work is detailed this week in Cancer Cell.

    Dichloroacetate (DCA) has hit the headlines with a splash recently being held as a cheap cure for cancer. The recent article in Cancer Cell is very intriguing in that it presents DCA as promoting apoptosis and inhibiting growth selectively in cancer cells while leaving healthy cells alone. The article also presents data showing it is not toxic to the liver.

However, there are a few perspectives of this compound that should be included in the public’s mind.