futurism.com
Image by Getty / FuturismDevelopmentsExThera, a US-based medical startup, claimed that its cutting edge blood-filtering device could cure cancer.Intrigued, an American billionaire named Alan Quasha capitalized on its promisebybuying the devices and taking overa medical clinic on the Caribbean island of Antigua outside the purview of US regulators, offering desperate, terminally ill cancer patients a chance of being healthy again at the price of $45,000 for each round of treatment.But as The New York Times reports, of the roughly two dozen patients treated at the Antigua clinic using the ExThera device, at least six died, likely as a result of their stay. Family members and medical professionals who visited the clinic reported horrifying conditions, including patients being treated without sufficient anesthesia, and a lack of basic hygienic practices.Most of all, it appears that the cancer-curing claims about the device were vastly overblown and in some cases, were spun into outright lies."I feel so duped by all these people," Kim Hudlow, whose husband, David, underwent treatment at the Antigua clinic, told the NYT. "The way this was spun up and the way it was explained, they got me."The ExThera device isn't total quackery, in the NYT's analysis. It was approved by the Food and Drug and Administration for treating emergency COVID-19 cases, and for that purpose, it seems effective. After the pandemic and seeking another stream of income, however, ExThera thought its device might be effective at filtering circulating tumor cells, or CTCs, which are responsible for cancer metastasizing.The startup's chief regulatory officer Sanja Ilic organized a study in Croatia to test the filter's efficacy on cancer patients. It yielded promising preliminary results, with at least one patient showing a shrunken tumor. But the Croatian study was tiny, with only 12 patients in total, and it wasn't led by an oncologist.It was enough to woo the billionaire investor Quasha, however, who invested several million dollars in ExThera through his firm Quadrant Management, and began operating a clinic in Antigua via a subsidiary called Quadrant Clinical Care,where the experimental treatment wouldn't need approval from from US regulators.When ExThera's director of medical affairs Jonathan Chow arrived at the clinic, according to the NYT's reporting, he was appalled by what he saw. Patients were bleeding profusely, and at least one was screaming in pain. He learned that the patients were instructed to abstain from chemotherapy, the most reliable treatment for halting the spread of cancer. There was also, Chow discovered, not a single oncologist on site.Other witnesses said that the clinic's lead doctor, Joey John, made incisions without any imaging or sufficient anesthesia. Chow warned ExThera's leadership about what he saw, and when they didn't listen, he resigned.Hudlow, a trained nurse, was on several occasions taken aback by the clinic's questionable practices and her husband's condition, which was not improving. In fact, after finishing the first round and returning home to Florida, it got worse and his cancer showed signs of growing more aggressively.But at every step of the way, a doctor was there telling her to continue her husband's treatment. On a phone call, Ilic, ExThera's chief regulatory officer, told her that her husband's pain was actually a good sign. It meant that David "had a strong immune activation," he said, per the NYT.Ilic also reportedly made multiple claims that weren't supported by the Croatian study, such as promising that one patient had recovered so thoroughly, with a 60 percent reduction in tumors, that he was now training for a marathon.The Hudlows returned for another bout of treatment. Shortly after, David's condition became so horrendous that he had to be scrambled back to a US hospital, where doctors found that his cancer had spread beyond saving. Two days later, he died.The NYT found that another patient, Ashley Sullivan, asked Ilic why she developed new tumors after her treatment. Ilic insisted she had it all wrong. "Have NO idea who told you is not working for you," Ilic texted Sullivan. "We got your CTCs down to zero."According to the newspaper, she died three months later.Share This Article
