Robert...Excellent post and fascinating questions. I can tell from the tone that you are quite energized these days...lol
Here's a small piece that may (or may not) help to answer your first point concerning clinical trials. Dr. Frudakis gave that interview to TWST in July 2003. I ordered the full transcript, and in response to the question, "Are you trying to be predictive of what peoples' sensitivities are or what markers might indicate bad reactions to a drug and then match it back to people?", he had this to say:
"...That is exactly what our test does — we have found a collection of human genome markers that comprise a set that is predictive for Taxol response, with 95% accuracy, and we intend to market this test as a tool for flagging potential nonresponders. The idea now in clinical trial, which may seem trivial to most of us, is if you can predict response before drug treatment begins, identify who is not going to respond to Taxol, and give them another drug, do overall survival rates increase? Clearly one would expect the answer to this to be yes, but one has to show it. So once that trial is finished, we expect to have our first pharmaco-predictive test, which could be sold to doctors and patients around the country to help them guide their chemotherapy decisions, especially for ovarian cancer..."
Now clearly there was some sort of clinical trial in progress as early as last July. Perhaps at Moffitt, perhaps not. But note that the clinical trial seemed not to be so much about testing the ability to select the responders/nonresponders. That they can already do. But the question was, if you give the nonresponders ANOTHER DRUG, do overall survival rates increase? In other words, what do we do with the nonresponders once identified.
So what do we have now? DNAPrint working with Moffitt on VARIOUS chemotherapies, probably to determine whether there is overlap among responders, or whether those that are nonresponders to some therapies are responders to others.
That's how you REALLY improve OVERALL survival rates for cancer patients, and is probably what has the Moffitt scientists and physicians impressed at the profound potential of DNAPrint's science.
Later,
W2P
AI
