Nobody Will Pay To Test It Because Nobody Can Own It
A cheap chemical shrank tumours in a laboratory in 2007 and went round the world in a week. The trial that would settle it has still never been run. The reason is not a conspiracy. It is arithmetic.
A months-long reporting project. Documents cited below are held in The Vault and available to readers.
EDMONTON, Alberta — It costs about seventy dollars a year to make. Its patent expired before most of the people taking it were born. You can buy a jar of it, today, from a website with no address on it.
In 2007 a laboratory in Alberta showed it shrinking tumours.
Nineteen years later, nobody has run the trial that would tell you whether that means anything, and this story is about why.
What actually happened in 2007
A research group published a paper showing that the compound restarted a metabolic pathway that many cancer cells switch off, and that when the pathway restarted, the cells died. It appeared to leave healthy cells alone, because their pathway was working already.
That was in cells and in rats.
Professor Yolanda Achterberg-Nnamdi, who has never worked on the molecule, walked our correspondent through the paper line by line and asked for one sentence printed near the top: a result in cells and rats is a reason to run a trial. It is not a reason to take a drug.
Most things that kill a tumour in a dish do nothing in a person. A good number of the ones that do something in a person do something dreadful.
Nobody hid it
The finding went round the world within a week of publication. The researcher gave interviews. He said plainly that it needed testing in people and that he did not have the money to test it.
Then he spent years trying to get the money, in public, on the record, which is the opposite of what a suppressed discovery looks like.
A small trial did happen — about fifty patients, funded substantially by public donation. Its results were mixed and were published, including the parts that were not encouraging.
That is the entire scandal, and it is not one.
The letter we sent sixteen times
We stopped asking whether somebody stopped it and started asking who would have had to start it.
So we wrote the same letter to sixteen bodies that could have funded a proper trial: the original manufacturer, four rival companies, three government granting councils, five cancer charities, two generic makers, and one sovereign fund.
Eleven replied. Nine gave a reason.
Not one of the nine reasons was about whether the drug works.
They were about exclusivity, about stage of research, about budget size, about remit, and in one unusually frank letter, about the fact that a positive result would require the sponsor to sell a product it could not stop anybody else from selling the following morning.
That letter is PX-2065 and we have printed it whole.
What the trial would cost
We retained somebody who prices clinical trials for sponsors and asked him to cost the study that would settle it: a phase III in one tumour type, powered properly, multi-site.
He priced it three ways and told us to print the middle one. Fifty-eight million dollars.
The donation drive that funded the small trial raised one and a half million, which is a remarkable thing for patients to have done and is about two and a half per cent of what is needed.
A generic manufacturer selling the compound at cost plus a margin would need something in the region of eight hundred thousand years of sales on it to pay for the trial. He worked that out on the call and then apologised for laughing.
The four people who take it anyway
We interviewed four people who buy it and take it.
All four know the evidence is thin. All four said so before we asked. None of them is a fool and none of them is waiting for a conspiracy to be exposed; they have all read the phase II results and two of them had read them more carefully than our correspondent had.
Two have had the peripheral nerve symptoms the trials describe — numbness in the feet, and in one case in the hands. Both reduced their dose on their own judgement, using no measurement of any kind, because there is no measurement of any kind available to them.
What they are buying is unmeasured, unregulated, and sold by people with no address. That is a direct consequence of the hole and it is the part of this story that this newspaper finds hardest to write calmly.
One of them, a retired schoolteacher, put it in a sentence our correspondent has not been able to put down:
"I am not doing this because I think there is a cure being hidden. I am doing it because I read the paper and I read the trial and I did the same sum you did, and I worked out that nobody is ever going to do the experiment, and I would like to know."
What this story establishes
That a cheap, unownable molecule produced an interesting laboratory result in 2007; that it was published openly and championed loudly; that a small trial was funded by patients and returned mixed results; and that the study which would settle it has not been funded in nineteen years by any of the sixteen bodies who could have funded it.
The people who say it will not be tested because there is no money in it have the mechanism exactly right.
They just keep looking for somebody to blame, and there is nobody in the room.
The six o'clock edition
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Sources & Method
We stopped asking whether it was suppressed and started asking who would have to pay. Then we wrote to all sixteen bodies that could have, with the same letter, and printed every reply we got including the four sentences long enough to be called a policy. Separately we retained somebody who prices trials for a living to cost the study that would settle it, and published his model rather than his number.
Who we spoke to
- Prof. Yolanda Achterberg-Nnamdi, Clinical pharmacologist; has never worked on this molecule. Interviewed by video call three times; walked us through the 2007 paper line by line March–June 2026 Asked us to print that a result in cells and rats is a reason to run a trial, not a reason to take a drug.
- Sixteen funding bodies, Granting councils, charities, companies and one sovereign fund. Written questions, identical, to each; eleven replied January–May 2026 Nine of the eleven gave a reason. None of the nine reasons was about the drug's effect.
- Desmond Achebe-Larkin, Costs a living pricing clinical trials for sponsors. Retained by this newspaper to cost the trial that would settle it; his model is published April 2026 Priced it three ways and gave us the middle one to print.
- Four people who take it, Named in our notes with consent; two asked us not to print their surnames. Interviewed at length; medical records seen with permission February–June 2026 All four buy it from suppliers with no oversight of any kind. Two have had side effects. All four know the evidence is thin and said so before we asked.
- The published literature, 2007–2026, Peer-reviewed. Read, including the phase II results and the two negative studies 2026
Documents
- PX-2065 — Reply to this newspaper's funding enquiry, from a pharmaceutical sponsor, declining to fund a phase III accepted
What we could not confirm
- Whether it works in people. Nineteen years of laboratory and small-trial evidence has not settled this, which is exactly what this story is about. Anybody who tells you it is settled, in either direction, is telling you something the evidence does not contain.
- The safety of the doses people are buying online. The peripheral nerve effects seen in trials are dose-related and reversible. What is being sold to patients is not measured by anybody and two of our four interviewees have had symptoms.
- Our trial costing. Costing a trial that has not happened involves assumptions, our man made them explicit, and a different set of assumptions gives a different number. His full model is published so you can move the assumptions yourself.
How Others Covered This
The same events, as reported elsewhere on the same day. We list what each outlet had that we did not, as well as what we had that they did not — including where we come off worse. Why we print this.
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ApertureThe Cheap Cure Problem
An essay on how the patent system decides which questions get answered, using three molecules rather than one.
Had that we did not
A much wider frame than ours and an economist we could not book.
Left out
The molecule. Their piece is about the system; ours went and stood in the lab.
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The Hollow PostTHE CURE THEY BURIED
Reported the 2007 laboratory result as a cure for cancer that was then suppressed.
Had that we did not
Nothing.
Left out
That the result was in cells and rats; that the researcher published it openly and pushed for trials for two decades; that a phase II was run and its results were mixed; and that nobody has ever alleged an instruction to stop.
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They Buriedthis newspaperNobody Will Pay To Test It Because Nobody Can Own It
Asked the funding question instead of the suppression question, and asked all six parties who could have paid.
Had that we did not
The rejection letters, and the trial costing, priced by somebody who prices trials.
Left out
Our headline implies the drug works and is being kept from people. It implies the first thing more than the evidence supports. — V. Ashcombe-Doyle, standards editor
Right of Reply
They Buried contacted Prof. Yolanda Achterberg-Nnamdi throughout; read the full draft with no deadline. Asked to reply in full because she expects to be quoted selectively by both sides. Printed unedited.
I want to say four things and I would like all four printed, because the first two get used by one side and the second two by the other.
One. The 2007 result was real and it was interesting. It was also in cells and in rats. That is the beginning of a question, not the end of one. Most things that shrink a tumour in a dish do nothing in a person, and the ones that do something in a person often do something terrible.
Two. Nobody suppressed it. The man who found it published it, immediately, in the open literature, and then spent years of his life trying to raise money to test it properly. He gave interviews. He begged. That is the opposite of suppression and it is a matter of public record.
Three. And yet. The trial that would settle this has not happened in nineteen years, and the reason really is that there is no owner and therefore no sponsor. That is not a conspiracy theory. That is how the system is built and everybody in the system knows it.
Four. Which means the people who say 'they will not test it because there is no money in it' have got the mechanism exactly right and the villain exactly wrong. There is no they. There is a set of rules that nobody wrote on purpose, and the rules produce a hole, and things fall in it.
I would rather your readers left angry about the hole than angry about a person, because the hole is the thing that can be fixed.
Published unedited under our right-of-reply guarantee.
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