Replies to post #3756 on NorthWest Biotherapeutics Inc (NWBO)

[shanak10]

Thank you for posting flipper44

[Astavakra]

Good catch Flipper.
I believe I heard Linda say at the last Marcum conference that initial patient uptake in the Direct trial is expected to be slow due to FDA. With a novel therapy, they like to see how the first patient tolerates and then slowly, initially, trickle in more patients. She explained that after initial logjam, enrollment will shoot up quickly.
I say this from my memory having been at the talk. If not exact, I believe that it is a close paraphrase to her remarks.
What I would really love an update on is whether they are approaching the end of that initial slow period, or, perhaps, have passed it.

[john1045]

Prior to this change posted on January 24th, they had listed Dr. Subbiah's phone and email information and the same for Orlando and Dr. Kayaleh. I have heard they were inundated with patient qualification requests, questions and very time consuming process and it was most likely reason for the change to remove their information.

I do pray for the patients and families that DCVax-Direct and DCVax-L are successful in becoming the standard of care for the treatment of all solid tumor cancers!

GLTA!

[flipper44]

Thanks John,


I had a feeling that might be the case.

[Doktornolittle]

John: Orlando is continuing enrollment... but when I last looked just a few weeks ago there was no indication that there were any patients enrolled. The trial outline was input in the database, but nothing was filled out.

So it still looks to me that there will be about 3 patients in Houston and 3 in Orlando, and we will hear about other clinics opening soon. The trial numbers might explode, but I don't think it will be at Orlando or Houston. But I am guessing, so not to discourage anyone from getting on their lists. But if Northwest has it's own central list, I would want to be on that list also.

My guess, based on the little info I gathered was that clinics in general try to treat all the accepted experimental therapies equally, and in doing that, they can only accept a few patients per experimental procedure.

To balance out this slight negativity: I have an acquaintance with metastasized lung cancer. I have described his situation before. To the credit of chemo and radiation, he is in remission with no tumor growth for some time. However, he has scars from the radiation therapy and a large knot on his chest where the chemo gets infused on a regular basis. He has been given regular chemo for years now, and has been told it will continue for life. Today he told me that the chemo he has just changed to costs $110K/yr. That is more than four times the cost of DCVax-L.

In the most recent Fox Business News special on NWBO and DCVax-L, there was a counter view guest, apparently planted, who argued at the end that DCVax type treatments were just too expensive to be practical. That was crap. Total crap. There was another similar presentation on Fox that ended with the same type of last minute statement from one of the hosts, that nobody had a chance to rebut.

DCVax-L currently requires surgery, chemo and radiation in addition to DCVax. So, initially the cost structure I am describing is not real. However, other than surgery, it is easy to imagine that the DCVax process will evolve quickly to include less severe and expensive adjuncts than radiation and chemo, that are also less damaging to the immune system. Further, the cost of an initial dose of chemo to weaken the cancer can't be terribly expensive. It is the cost of continuing the chemo, which is expensive and will probably go away, along with the damage that it does to the immune system.

But it's not that radiation and chemo are horrible things. They apparently save lives and extend lives sometimes. And to be honest, they are not always debilitating. My acquaintance swims at the same pool where I swim, and he is pretty fast. Not as fast as he used to be apparently, but he is in much better than average shape for a 66 year old.

But radiation and chemo were not developed as adjuncts to immunotherapy. They both severely damage the immune system. In fact, I recently read that SOC chemo for GBM often eventually destroys the immune system, at which point tumor regrowth begins / the patient starts to go under. It's not just a matter of the patient getting nauseous. So I believe the true potential of DCVax and other immunotherapies have not yet been tapped. I realize that this view is not new or controversial, but there are a lot of newbies on the blog these days.