I attended the briefing yesterday. Among other things, Dr Kelly confirmed that a compassionate patient had achieved an 'abscopal response'.
The muted reaction of the Market and of some in the audience indicates that the significance of an abscopal response has not been fully appreciated, so I will try a GK-like explanation.
If diagnosed with cancer, you know that surgery and toxic chemotherapy lie ahead and that in time the cancer will probably recur and spread throughout the body, leaving no effective treatment options and, during this terrible episode, a poor quality of life. Now imagine that you could instead attend a clinic and receive low-dose radiation to a single tumour, together with NOX66 (which spreads throughout the body and binds exclusively to cancer cells), and within weeks ALL cancer has responded - even though most of it was not irradiated at all. This is the reality with an abscopal response.
NOX66 has been given in this way to a single compassionate patient - just one - and that patient experienced an abscopal response. The only other person to be treated the same way has been Graham Kelly, and four years later he has no cancer at all. This is absolutely stunning news, so why aren't people more excited? I blame the scientific word 'abscopal' itself, which is a bit too abstract for me.
As Dr Karl said in one of his science reports, 'Ab' means 'away', while 'scopal' refers to a 'target'. So an abscopal effect in this case means that you treat a cancer in one part of the body, and somehow, all of that cancer which is spread anywhere else in the whole body is killed.
We do not know the extent of the response in the compassionate patient, because the data is held by the treating physicians who have the right to get scientific accolades by publishing it in a prestigious journal. What we can deduce is this: (1) a compassionate patient must have had a rare cancer that had no treatment option; (2) the patient would have been terminally ill; (3) the patient must have had secondary tumours in the body; and (4) the primary and secondary tumours have responded, including those in distant parts of the body that were NOT irradiated.
If I remember correctly, the compassionate program started at the beginning of 2017 or thereabouts. It is wonderful news that the first patient is still alive and doing well.
