If you're going to criticise others for factual inaccuracies, at least get it right yourself!

He is a doctor. He qualified as one in the 1990s from Birmingham University with degrees in Medicine and Surgery (MB, BS, ie Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery) which are the basic qualifications for virtually all medical practitioners in the UK. In the noughties he was elected by examination to be a Member of the Royal College of Physicians of the UK - MRCP(UK) - showing that he had much more than a basic schooling in medicine.
He is undoubtedly a medical doctor and one with more than the usual experience and knowledge, but that, of course, doesn't necessarily mean that he is correct in his comments about the trial.
Your confusion is understandable since all properly trained US doctors appear to have been awarded the degree of MD. In the UK a Doctorate in Medicine (MD) is only awarded to doctors who have carried out original research into some aspect of medical practice and then debated and defended their thesis against acknowledged experts. Very few doctors in the UK are MDs. This system of awarding a doctorate extends into other areas of life. For example a clergyman who entered the church after studying and taking an ordinary degree in theology at University can big himself up by carrying out original research into a theological subject which if successfully debated and defended will lead to him/her becoming a Doctor of Divinity (DD).
Dr Williams carried out original research into a non-medical subject but went through the same process of debate and defence as would an MD. However, because his research was not into a medical subject per se he was awarded Doctorate in Philosophy, PhD, an equally prestigious award in the UK as an MD.
I do not know the set up in the US where all doctors appear to be MDs, but I doubt that they all have undertaken some original research and defended their thesis to be awarded a Doctorate in Medicine.
Best wishes.

exwannabe
Further to my answer about Dr Matthew Williams, I can now answer your question about Dr. Rago.
Dr Rago is correctly entitled as a Doctor as he is a PhD (Doctor of Philosophy). He is not a qualified medical practitioner who is only allowed to call him/herself a doctor as a description of their job. Pedantically, Dr Rago is more entitled to call himself "Dr" than I or any other medical practitioner who is only allowed by custom to use the honorific "Dr" by virtue of having been fully trained as a medical practitioner and having passed all the required examinations. Consequently, I can lay hands on a patients without being open to the accusation of assault (unless my laying on of hands was inappropriate) and treat them with potentially poisonous medications (unless they were in recklessly inappropriate dosages) without the same charge being levelled against me. Dr Rago would not have that privilege.
However, in matters of the science of medicine, Dr Rago is streets ahead of anybody who has trained solely as a medical practitioner, be he MB, BS in the UK or their equivalent in the US. He gained his PhD after being at John Hopkins from 2001-7 where his area of expertise was in Cellular and Molecular Medicine-Oncolgy. This encompasses the area in which DCvax is scientifically based so that he will almost certainly have a far better insight into the science behind the drug than the "man (or doctor) in the street".
The only way a medical practitioner (a common or garden doctor) might be better than Dr Rago is in the clinical side of medical practice and there you have such people as Prof Liau and Prof Ashkan who are no mean slouches when it comes to the treatment of GBM and trials into GBM therapy.

The short answer is "Yes" he is a doctor as we all understand it, just as I am a doctor and the mythical Gregory House is a doctor.

He qualified as a Medical Practitioner in 1996 at Birmingham University taking the degrees of MB and BS (Bachelor of Medicine and Surgery respectively). He had previously taken a degree in Pharmacology, B Sc (Bachelor of Science), in 1996 at the same University but this, by itself, would not make him a doctor.
In 2002 he was elected by examination to be a Member of the Royal College of Physicians of the UK - MRCP(UK). Even if he was not a medicallly qualified doctor, this by itself would enable him to correctly entitle himself as a "Doctor".
In 2008 he was made a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) for original work at the Advanced Computation Lab at Cancer Research UK/University College, London (CR/UCL).

As for Dr Rago, I cannot answer your question off the top of my head.

Best wishes.

I think that a misconception has crept in here relating to nomenclature.
In the UK a Medical Practitioner (be he/she a General Practitioner or a Hospital Doctor) must have completed a course of instruction directly related to medical practice. This is usually a University course which leads to graduation and the award of 2 academic degrees, usually MB ("Medicinae Baccalaureus" = Bachelor of Medicine) and BS or BChir ("Chirurgiae Baccalaureus" = Bachelor of Surgery). They are then accorded the honorific title of "Dr" as in Dr. Gregory House.
This is the equivalent of MD in the US.
If a UK doctor then undertakes postgraduate research in a medical subject under the auspices of the University at which he studied, he may be awarded a further degree, that of MD - Doctor of Medicine. This is the equivalent of postgraduate degrees such as PhD - Doctor of Philosophy or DD - Doctor of Divinity, etc., all of which indicate that the individual has successfully carried out original research under the auspies of the university in that particular subject - repectively in surgery (amongst many other subjects such as chemistry, engineering, aeronautics etc) and in divinity. That is why some clergymen, engineers or industrial chemists can use the honorific "Dr".
Just because a UK doctor does not have MD after his/her name does not mean that he/she is not a fully qualified Medical Practitioner.

by By Kristin Houser
STAT = Statnews: Journalist: Adam Feuerstein
Say No More - except terrible journalism

I'm intrigued! I don't recall his comments and would be interested in what he said and in what circumstances. Can you put up the quote or direct me to when it was published in The Times?
Best wishes.

Well, that counts me out, and all those who qualified as Medical Practitioners from Cambridge University (and many other UK Medical Schools) since 1967.

The Hippocratic Oath has not been a required part of qualifying as a doctor in the UK for decades.

I have.
1st reference - nothing
2nd reference - "The conventional dendritic cell 1 subset primes CD8+ T cells and traffics tumor antigen to drive anti-tumor immunity in the brain"
Jay A. Bowman-Kirigin, Brian T. Saunders, Rupen Desai, Anthony Z. Wang, Max O. Schaettler, Connor J. Liu, Alexandra J. Livingstone, Dale K. Kobayashi, Vivek Durai, Nicole M. Kretzer, Gregory J. Zipfel, Eric C. Leuthardt, Joshua W. Osbun, Michael R. Chicoine, Albert H. Kim, Kenneth M. Murphy, Tanner M. Johanns, Bernd H. Zinselmeyer, Gavin P. Dunn

Nothing about the peer review of the DCVax-L study and nothing by Dr Ashkan.

The FDA and CDC may be that corrupt but the UK and European regulatory authorities are different animals to them. If BP do block DCVax in the US, expect significant numbers of US citizens flying over the pond to get the treatment here. Sadly, it will only be the richest since I would doubt that the US Medical insurers would have the moral compassion to pay for a successful treatment which is not (yet) licenced in the USofA, leaving most patients in the US to die prematurely of their GBM, until public opinion forces the FDA and CDC to overcome their financially induced obedience to their masters .

Thanks, Hygro.
doclee

On a point of information, is that in terms of total volume of pharmaceuticals prescribed annually or in total value (£ or $) of pharmaceuticals prescribed annually?

"post" (latin) = "after", "hoc" (latin) = "this"
"post hoc" translates as "after this". In this context "hoc" refers to the act of unblinding to reveal the Top Line Data.
To repeat what has been said over and over again on this board whenever claims that the endpoints were changed "post hoc", this change was made and notified to all the Regulatory Authorities before the unblinding, a fact that has been made clear over and over again. This is perfectly acceptable to the RAs and is not, as you and your ilk claim, a form of cherry picking from known results (which is not acceptable).
So stop wasting everybody's time and patience by banging on about your misconceived opinion, arising (as it does) from the fact that you are using a foreign language phrase whose correct meaning you clearly do not know.

I am somewhat bemused that astrological cycles are being cited as causes of past catastrophic events and presume that you mean "astronomical". Astrology is an ancient (and unscientific) way which claims to foretell the future and, in this case, to explain the past but which is not underwritten by any form of factual evidence. Astronomy, on the other hand, is based squarely on observable science.

Sorry to disagree with you, KoolAid, but he will be King Charles III.
Charles I was beheaded at the instigation of the Puritan faction of his opponents in 1649 after his forces (the "Cavaliers") were defeated by the "Roundheads" in the English Civil War.
Charles II was invited back the the UK to be King when the British population got fed up with the Puritan rule of the "The Commonwealth" of which Oliver Cromwell was the self-appointed "Lord Protector" of the state. (His son succeeded him for a few short years.) During the Commonwealth (also known as "The Protectorate"), 1649 to 1660, anything of which the Puritans disapproved (eg the Theatre and any form of "lascivious or bawdy entertainment" was banned and strict Sunday observance was brought in with failure to attend church services being punished with fines etc. The citizenry did not take to this imposition on their happiness and invited Charles I's son to return from exile on the Continent and be their King.
Charles II was morally the complete opposite of the Puritans and his reign was a complete success with the English happy to have him as their King. (By-the-by, he had a long time mistress, Nell Gwynne, who was an orange seller!)
Incidentally, Charles has just confirmed that he will be known as King Charles III.

.. and the logic of that is that exwannabe's real name is...?

He's growing on you??? You mean like a verruca???

You might very well be right. After all he is a bit of something that might be scraped out of your underpants.

No - a perfectly reasonable speculation as to what might be considered a long delay in publication of the top line data by the company, a delay which is occasioned by the as yet non-appearance of the data in a peer reviewed journal. Had the data been clear cut and straight forward in their interpretation, one would have expected that by now the reviewers would have found nothing of concern and passed the article for journal publication. This is, of course, yet another reasonable speculation.

Gary, I doubt that having "VAX" in the name will dissuade any rational person from accepting a treatment which is likely to be the definer between whether they recover from their GBM or die from it. If a patient declines to have it because "VAX" is in its name, then I guess that will probably be an example of Darwinism in action.
I personally think that DCVax can only rehabilitate vaccination as a rational and effective treatment and not a plot by shady organisations to dominate the world in whatever improbable way the antivaxxers may wish us to believe.

Thanks BWIS & Lykiri for your help. Having read the minutiae of the DC preparation in the article, I can only conclude that NWBO's "secret recipe" (whatever the ingredients and the cooking may be) make the difference between success and failure. I only hope that one day very soon NWBO's secret recipe will be shown to be way more valuable than that of another world (perhaps) leader, Coca Cola. (I, however, prefer Pepsi.)

A question.
In the linked article in "Frontiersin.org", the therapy immediately following DCVax-L (ref. 83) was using an agent called "Audencel" (ref. 84). This was also an autologous dendritic cell vaccine primed with lysed GBM tissue but it failed. It's failure was reported in Cancers (Basel) (2018) 10:372–86. doi: 10.3390/cancers10100372, but I cannot access the full artcle, only the abstract.
Can anybody tell me what differences there were in the production of the failed treatment, "Audencel", and the production of DCVax-L?

Many thanks.

If it is now legal under U.K. law for an unproven medical product (DCVax-L) to be produced at Sawston and used in the UK, would it also be lawful for the same process by which DCVax-L is produced to be used to produce a dendritic cell vaccine for another malignancy? All that would be needed is for a biopsy specimen of, say, pancreatic tumour to be used instead of a specimen of Glioblstoma Multiforme.

Of course, if it were allowable in law, the recipient of the DCVax-Pancreatic would have to pay for it, but that is what is already being done with DCVax-L.

How about the plutocratic autocracies of Big Pharma?

There is an interesting report in the current edition of "The Journal for the Immunotherapy of Cancer", entitled "Safety and efficacy of dendritic cell-based immunotherapy DCVAC/OvCa added to first-line chemotherapy (carboplatin plus paclitaxel) for epithelial ovarian cancer: a phase 2, open-label, multicenter, randomized trial".

It is by a group from the Czech Republic and deals with Ovarian Cancer. It can be found here.

The basic method is to make a vaccine ("DCVAC/OvCa") by exposing the patient's dendritic cells (from leukapheresis) to cells from two established ovarian cancer cell lines (OV-90 and SK-OV-3), which cells had been killed by high hydrostatic pressure. This provided the source of multiple Tumour Associated Antigens for loading onto the autologous DCs.

There were 2 active arms of the treatment and 1 control. The control had standard debulking surgery followed by chemotherapy, whilst the active arms had the same plus the vaccine either during the initial treatment or after it ("sequentially").

The results of the trial led the investigators to conclude that DCVAC/OvCa and leukapheresis was not associated with significant safety concerns and that the vaccine given sequentially to debulking and chemotherapy was associated with a statistically significant improvement in PFS in patients undergoing first-line treatment of Epithelial Ovarian Cancer ("EOC").

Whilst there are many differences between this and the NWBO vaccines , the efficacy shown by this trial should comfort those of us whose belief in NWBO is currently sorely tried by the lack of information emanating from management.

Gary, Although the journals publish on Thursdays, with Lancet Oncology you can sign up to receive notification of articles to be published as soon as the decision is made to publish. This can be at any time between the last edition of the journal and the publication of the next edition. You can thus get prior knowledge of an article by up to several weeks.

Sign up with Lancet Oncology by going to www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/onlineFirst, click on "register for eTOC alerts". You will then have to register with them (no fee or obligations) and simply carry on from there. You will then receive notification of each article as the decision is made to include it for publication.

Seeking Alpha have an article on NWBO by Avisol Capital Partners

AF discovers just how wrong he was to dismiss targeted therapy for proctalgia.

Bob,

Why do you think this?
Is it because you believe the statisticians are still crunching the numbers (if so, how many ways can there be to shuffle the combinations around??) or is Management waiting untill all the ducks are in line, especially the industrial manufacturing side ( particularly at Sawston)?

You're correct.
Why should I buy shares at 80cents when tomorrow I can buy them for 50cents.
On the other hand, I hope that I'm wrong when I look at what's being written on this board and am strongly reminded of the Emperor Nero fiddling while Rome burns and stewards re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic while its sinking.

To clarify; England has never been short of gas - natural or political flatulence - but had a temporary famine of petrol (aka gasoline) at the petrol pumps due to a lack of tanker drivers to transport it between the refineries and petol stations. (Take your pick of why there was a shortage of drivers, but Brexit looms large in most answers).

Flipper, when did recruitment to the trial restart after the German authority imposed a pause in July 2015?

My Virus checker identifies this site as having malware

++++++ Beware Malware ++++++
My virus checker (Avast) blocked access to the site because it had detected the presence of malware - "HTML:Script-inf" (whatever that might do)

Although I have been an investor in NWBO for 8 years and believe that the treatment works, I do wish that people wouldn't tempt fate and refrain from making predictions of how many billions NWBO will be worth in the next 12 months / 2 years / 5 years.

The words "chickens", "count" and "hatched" keep springing to mind.

That's a logical step until DCVax-Direct gets licenced.
There is no conceivable reason why a lysate made from a peripheral tumour should not behave in the same way as one from a GBM in sensitising the patient's own dendritic cells. The only problem is that insurance companies almost certainly won't pay for the treatment until the FDA licence Direct.

You're right, Dr. Bala.
Daily notifications are easily set up at https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/home and clicking on "Alerts".
You can then choose to be alerted daily, weekly or monthly.

If you want to receive a weekly update list of articles accepted for the monthly edition of "Lancet Oncology", you should be able to register free of charge through this site https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/onlineFirst?utm_campaign=update-lanonc&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=166828786&_hsenc=p2ANqtz--kYwOiVax82NtpDq14kHeFRP3H6b_UZk3BBEbGV2lyebE3XNG6DcIAAdslJtlBl_whfkLH1DOXBzimYH7v-D7CduxB2g&utm_content=166828786&utm_source=hs_email and then click on the "Register for eTOC alerts"

JR, if it is as you say, do Mrs Powers and Mr Goodman, lawyers as they are, see themselves as immune from the law or are they just postponing the evil day when they are exposed to the world as cheats and liars?

Ex - I've wanted to know for some time, what did you want to be?

John Wesley had it all down pat about the medical uses of electricity in his book, "Primitive Physick" (1765)



and it was apparently as free of side-effects as DCVax promises to be!