Posted on 07/23/2002 3:54:10 PM PDT by anymouse
I am not sure if you can. Which is why many people go to mexico for treatment.
They caused the Imclone problem, when it looked like the drug was performing OK . And the one I have been following is CellPathways which thought they were close to approval, but a key FDA manager was changed and the new team denied approval for a promising treatment for Colon Polyps and Colon Cancer!
Propecia must do something awful to unborn babies, since the ads warn pregnant women not to touch a broken tablet. No old stigma attached to that one, though.
They caused the Imclone problem, when it looked like the drug was performing OK . And the one I have been following is CellPathways which thought they were close to approval, but a key FDA manager was changed and the new team denied approval for a promising treatment for Colon Polyps and Colon Cancer!
The ones I have been following are angiostatin and endostatin, which are in early Phase II of the FDA three phase testing process. There was a widely publicized article about these drugs in the New York Times in May 1998, pointing out that these substances, used as single injected time-released agents, or combined with themselves but nothing else, and taken over a long period of time, had a 100% cure rate for mice with a wide variety of tumors, when treatment was started when the tumor was 3%-4% of body weight. This article was widely criticised as raising false hopes in patients and was met with predictions that the drugs would not work as well in humans. Probably, they won't work as well in humans. However, what is also true is that, over four years later, there still has been no attempt to replicate the mice experiments in humans. Undoubtedly, humans newly diagnosed with lung or pancreatic cancer could be found who would volunteer to completely forego conventional treatments in favor of what the mice got, but replicating the mouse experiments in humans is nonetheless considered unethical and would not fit into the FDA approval model. Eventually, years from now, the FDA will probably approve one or both drugs as a supplement to existing treatments and/or as a last resort after other treatments failed. Only then, through off label use, will we be able to learn the true potential. If the TB researchers in the 1940's had been delayed in this way, how many of those reading this would not be with us!
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