Replies to post #4374 on NorthWest Biotherapeutics Inc (NWBO)

[tradingintheusa]

Therefore, I am wondering how scientists will detect systemic response in these small tumors that are hard to see….I assume they will use various clinical means, including some types of chemical tracers?

Don't they use Ultra Sound to guide the injection!? My take is that it's too hard to inject them safely guided by Ultra Sound. But they can check later with an MRI that the small tumors also were shrinking/gone at a later point in time.

[Reefrad]

this is also the whole rational for the current TNM staging system. all cancers are staged M1 -> stage 4 once distant metastases are present. note that it does not matter if there is 1 or 1000 distant mets. the staging is the same. the reason is because the prognostics do not depend on the number of mets. again, the explanation is that even if the CT or MRI or PET only show a few mets, there are many more that remain too small to detect. Also note that stage 4 cancer is NOT treated with locoregional therapy. surgery is not performed. this is because it does not change outcome.

for this reason the immune approach is supposed to be a systemic approach, to enhance or even replace chemotherapy in advanced stages. DIrect -> unresectable cancer (advanced stage).

[f3tt3f]

True, so one could assume (if all visible tumors were injected in a metastatic cancer) that if the vaccine cleared them AND no other tumors appeared elsewhere in the body (which you would expect in such prolific cancers) that a systemic response has occurred.

They way I was reading people's interpretation here was clinicians would purposely leave some tumors untreated as an experiment.