Dehydroascorbic acid as an anti-cancer agent.

Three discoveries together point the way to a potential treatment for cancer. In 1982, Poydock and colleagues found that dehydroascorbic acid has the remarkable ability to eliminate the aggressive mouse tumours, L1210, P388, Krebs sarcoma, and Ehrlich carcinoma. In 1993, Jakubowski found that cancer cells (but not normal cells) contain measurable quantities of homocysteine thiolactone. Recently, the author found that dehydroascorbic acid reacts with homocysteine thiolactone converting it to the toxic compound, 3-mercaptopropionaldehyde. Taken together, these findings suggest that rapidly-dividing tumour cells make unusually large amounts of homocysteine thiolactone and that administered dehydroascorbic acid enters the cells and converts the thiolactone to mercaptopropionaldehyde which kills the cancer cells. The effectiveness of dehydroascorbic acid might be further increased by combining it with methionine and/or methotrexate to increase the homocysteine concentration in cancer cells.