Avid Bioservices Inc (CDMO)

[Protector]

Brain Cancer (GMB) and Tumor Treating Fields (TTS).

PPHM's Cotara is drug injected true an opening in the skull with a dual catheter, into the solid tumor that GMB patients have.

In 2007 TTS was a research domain for GMB too

In Sept 2011, on a San Diego TEDMed conference this presentation was given about it.

At first I took this serious but know I have put some question marks out. I found this web-site where this video is linked and where you also find AF's famous article about Cotara being removed from under the dust. That immediately raised a RED FLAG! No serious web-site in his right mind, and I checked the national brain tumor site, would ever put this on their web-site.

Then I actually saw that the web-site was about Novocure, a kind of apparatus for TTF and they let no stone un-turned to promote the stuff.

Then I wondered why Cotara got an Orphan status from the FDA and a Fast Track if there was a cure for GMB (which is what is claimed, also in the video). Even more, this device seems to works for just the same solid cancers as does Bavi (Breast, Lung and Pancreatic being mentioned explicitly).

So I quickly found out that the video had nothing to do with the web-site (it is a YouTube) and that the FDA mentioning in the video are very probably not even related to the Novocure product.

At min 1:50 of the video, about misconceptions of electric fields, I started to be even more suspicious. The guy says things like:

Electric Fields are not electric current
Electric Fields are not ionizing radiation like X-Rays
Electric Fields are not magnetism

Electric Fields are fields of forces that act on, attract, bodies that have an electrical charge.

People, certainly since the experiments in Psychiatry past century, are not very happy with the idea of electric current passing through there body, let alone their brain. Unfortunately, if there is an electric field, a Faraday representation of the forces between two electric potentials, then there is inequality of charge. Charge always wants to even out, get in a state of equipotential, and if it has at least one path of sufficiently low resistance it will do that. Moving charge, normally the negatively charged electrons in traditional electrical application, but actually any charged entity in physics, is called an electric current (the positive ions don't move in copper only because they are tied into their lattice structure while the electrons are free to move).

So if they put an electric field over your head and it is sufficiently strong to act on charged particles as the video claims, then an electric current will come into existence.

That electric fields are not to be compared to X-rays that is correct. X-Rays are electromagnetic waves and are therefore energy carried by a non-mechanical wave in terms of physics (a wave no being carried by an elastic medium).

That electric fields are not magnetism (themselves) is correct too but when your electric fields creates an electric current, as explained above, then we do not find ourselves in Electro Statics but in Electro Dynamics. Every amount of moving charge generates a related magnetic field.

So while electric fields are not themselves the described phenomena, they are at the basis of them coming into existence!

What troubles me more is what comes next. The cell body is VERY charged the man says and the electric field can therefore act upon it. When it does so when a cancer cell is about to split the cell has difficulty to do so and finally can't in most cases and then dies and enters the apoptic process.

Yes BUT, and lets assume everything he says is correct, then this technique affects ALL cells in the field, not only the tumor cells. As you will find on the referenced site one of the findings was that patients didn't get cured because they removed the device after two years. They were blamed and should have kept it on!

You know what, this makes sense! If you keep cells on and around the tumor from spitting (assuming this works), cancer and healthy cells, then after a while all cancer cells must be gone because no new ones come into existence. You loose a lot of healthy cells, and your body must replace them, and you have a lot of debris because cell are destroyed much faster then they would in a normal life cycle. I would have expected a systemic reaction and some form of constant fever but because he claims the cells are treated as in the apoptic cycle they probably get clean-up while we sleep together with other death cells. In other words the immune system hasn't been activated because there is nothing to activate it because they don't inject you with something.

Just like with chemo and radio this is poor cell targeting compared to Cotara. Then again Cotara needs some surgery, but at least in two days it is behind you and you don't carry a that device for years.

However, all that is only true if there are no short/long term side effects of the healthy cells being affected too and if all this really works. Personally I don't see low AC currents, that due to their AC nature can hardly make the charged entities vibrate back and forth between the alternating potentials of the device, disrupt cancer cell proliferation and I certainly would not be able to explain why healthy cells are not affected in exactly the same way and disappear at a same rate as the cancer cells shown on the radio's in the movie. Maybe just because they didn't mark the healthy cells and we don't see it, but still it doesn't make sense. The volume of healthy cells should diminished equally as under equal electric field.


So electric currents (of type AC - remember Edison's campaigns against Tesla's AC current that was KILLING current :) and related magnetic fields around our brain doesn't sound really good. For all we know it results in memory loss and disrupts function, possibly only in the long term, because neural cells and neurons will be affected too. All electric currents in our body (and many arrive at our brain through nerves such as the optic nerve from our eyes for instance) are by definition using charge, hence referred to as electric signals. Therefor they are affected by every eclectic potential difference that stands over them.

I didn't investigate this sufficiently but for now I am under the impression that this has a high hoax smell! One would think that if putting this cap, or the chest-back equivalent that they refer to in the movie, on (the guy claims FDA PIII approval if I understood that right) and it gets rid of solid tumors that we would have heard of it and have plenty of people being treated with a device that can hardly cost more then 1000$.

We'll see!