Dichloroacetate
Also called: DCA.
Last reviewed 2026-09-16. How this works.
When to call your team
Contact your care team if you notice:
- numbness, tingling or pins and needles in the hands or feet
- burning or shooting pains in the feet or legs
- becoming unsteady on your feet
- weakness in the hands or difficulty with buttons and keys
The dose-limiting problem in the human study of this compound was nerve damage in the hands and feet, which reversed when the amount was reduced. These are reasons to make a phone call. They are not a diagnosis, and this page cannot tell you what is causing them. Several cancer treatments cause the same symptoms, which is exactly why your team needs to know everything you are taking.1
These are reasons to make contact, not a diagnosis. Whatever you are taking or thinking of taking, the people treating you can only weigh it if they know about it.
This block is about what to watch for, and it is not all this page holds: what has been recorded about harm is below. Nothing in this block is an all-clear for a question it does not mention.
Treating cancer Grade D
No human evidence of benefit, or none that survived testing.
Harm has been recorded in people for this claim. The grade measures how strong the evidence for benefit is; it says nothing about the harm, and the two are read from different parts of this page.
This drug was shown to do what it was meant to do inside real tumours, in five people, with no trial since.
Target engagement shown in human tumour tissue. No controlled efficacy trial.
The harm
The dose-limiting toxicity was nerve damage in the hands and feet. The chapter note records it as dose-dependent and reversible, moderate to severe at higher amounts and minimal to absent at lower ones, rather than as a hard ceiling.1
The claim
The claim is that dichloroacetate reverses the metabolic shift that cancer cells make, turning their energy production back toward the normal pathway and letting them die as they should.
What it does
It inhibits an enzyme that keeps cells in that shifted state. Two things make this entry different from most of the register, and both correct errors the book made in draft.
This compound is not blocked by absorption. It is water-soluble, described as having near-complete bioavailability, and it crosses into the brain. The concentration argument that defeats curcumin and cannabinoids does not apply here, and pretending it did would be dishonest.1
The evidence
Freshly isolated glioblastomas from 49 patients showed the metabolic state the drug was designed to target, and it was rapidly reversed by the drug. Separately, five people with glioblastoma were treated with oral dichloroacetate with tumour tissue sampled before and during treatment, and the drug did in their tumours what it does in a dish.1
That is target engagement demonstrated in human tissue, which is more than almost anything else in this register has. It is also five people, and the authors state plainly that no conclusions about clinical efficacy can be drawn from that number.1
Fifteen years later there is still no controlled trial of whether it helps anyone. The grade is for that absence and nothing else.1
The studies this rests on
-
Metabolic modulation of glioblastoma with dichloroacetate1
A trial with no comparison group, open label, phase 1, measured a laboratory marker, not an outcome, 5 participants.
target engagement demonstrated in tumour tissue; the authors state efficacy conclusions cannot be drawn from this number of patients.
What is absent
No trial has compared people treated with dichloroacetate against comparable people who were not. The human evidence is five people with tissue sampling and no comparison group.
Scope: any tumour type, any endpoint.
Established by trial scope, checked 2026-09-16. Result: the only human study in this record treated five patients with no control group.1
What to ask
Is there a dichloroacetate trial open that I could be assessed for?
The dish-to-person gap
No human pharmacokinetic measurement is recorded here, but the chapter note records something that matters more for this entry than a number would: dichloroacetate is a water-soluble small molecule with near-complete bioavailability that readily crosses the blood-brain barrier.1
Interactions
The register holds no measured interaction between dichloroacetate and a cancer treatment class.
Nobody having looked is not the same as nothing being there. That is what this line says and all it says.
The whole interaction list, and how to turn it into a pharmacy review request.
Find a trial instead
Phase 2 trials in recurrent glioblastoma were recruiting as of 2026, so this is an entry where a trial is a real option.
Search ClinicalTrials.gov for recruiting studies of dichloroacetate OR DCA
A trial is the same decision with monitoring, a known preparation and a doctor who knows what else you are taking.
References
Michelakis ED and colleagues. Metabolic modulation of glioblastoma with dichloroacetate. Science Translational Medicine, 2010.
doi:10.1126/scitranslmed.3000677 · PubMed 20463368
How this was reached: transcribed from chapter note, via docs/CHAPTER-NOTES.json, chapter 14 note 13. The author string is abbreviated in the source that was read and has not been expanded.