hope on the horizon

thankyou for your good wishes, yes Karen we did try alot of treatments for my Dad. you will find alot of info under the dc therapy thread in this research section, my Dad find chemo harsh and did not tolerate it well – harnessing the cancer fighting properties of our natural immune systems seems logical to me. DC therapy works on the same lines too..

Jeff, thanks for your message, yes we all need hope, I will keep an eye out too. Here is the reply from dr Cui. (Standard response due to demand for info):

Dear cancer patients and family members and friends,

Thank you very much for your inquires about our research project on a new cancer therapeutic concept based on many years of research on cancer-resistant mice and cancer-resistant humans. Recent media events were sparked by my recent presentation at a conference at University of Cambridge, UK. (video: http://richardjschueler.com/wp-gallery2.php?g2_itemId=56888) In this talk, I briefly described our work on how we made the transition from laboratory research to a new therapeutic concept for human cancer treatment. However, since then, I have been inundated with countless inquiries about this new experimental cancer therapy. I simply can’t respond to all these inquiries specifically. I am writing this general response letter and hope that you will get some idea about the planned clinical trials with a starting time aimed for next June of 2008.

This treatment involves how to identify cancer-resistant healthy human donors, how to collect a specific set of white blood cells, particularly granulocytes, from human donors, how to infuse cancer patients with these collected granulocytes and how to evaluate the response of cancer patients to this treatment. This treatment does not involve any new compound or drug that can be shipped around. It depends on basically something similar to blood transfusion that requires both patients and donors to be at same facility, or in this case, at Wake Forest University Medical Center here in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

We planned two phase II clinical trials. In the first trial with 22 patients (already approved by IRB and FDA), our goal is to randomly select a group appropriate cancer patients, based on criteria set by our physician team, to test the dose of granulocytes they can tolerate. The medical term for this test is called “dose escalation”. Not all cancer patients will meet the criteria for this trial. For example, late stage cancer patients who are not ambulatory or who don’t have more than four months of life expectancy will not be considered for this experimental therapy. The effect of this new therapy on malignant diseases will not be a primary goal of observation. If the trial shows that the patients can indeed tolerate our proposed doses of granulocytes, then we are ready to move into the second planned trial. The second trial will test what kind of cancer will have beneficial responses to this therapy. We will select several patients from different types of cancers. By the end of these two trials, we should have a very good idea about if this experimental treatment is a good one or not.

Before next June when the first trial begin, our Wake Forest team has to establish a donor registry consisted of about 100 local volunteer eligible donors from approximately several hundreds of initial healthy willing participants. These donors will be on call when they are needed for granulocyte donation. These donors have to pass the anticancer activity test and infectious disease test before they can become eligible donors. The current cost estimate for each patient is about $50K to $100K and the whole trial will take $2M to $3M in US dollars. This estimate is to cover expenses for the recruitment of donors, testing donors for infectious status and anticancer activities, collection of granulocytes from donors, transfusion procedures, standard disease monitoring procedures before and after treatment and standard patient care. The treatment is an out-patient procedure and does not require hospitalization. Patients are expected to be responsible for their own transportation and accommodation during their treatment period. We are actively trying to raise funding for this trial in hope that all or a portion of cancer patients in this trial can be treated based on clinical and scientific criteria, rather than on their ability to pay. However, such a hope will have to depend on how successful our fund-raising will be.

Early next year, Wake Forest University will make official announcement about these clinical trials. We will create a website specifically for these trials so that enrollment of patients and potential donors can be done electronically. In this way, patients who are not local would have equal opportunity to be considered for entering the trials.

Thank you.

Zheng Cui, MD, PhD

Associate Professor

Section of Tumor Biology

Department of Pathology

Wake Forest University School of Medicine

2103 Gray Building

Medical Center Boulevard

Winston-Salem, North Carolina 27157

Phone: 336-716-6185

Fax: 336-716-6757

Email: zhengcui@wfubmc.edu