American billionaire Alan Quasha invested in the ExThera device, taking over a clinic in Antigua to treat terminally ill cancer patients. However, reports indicated poor medical conditions and false claims about treatment effectiveness. Many patients suffered greatly, with at least six deaths linked to the clinic. While the ExThera device showed some promise in COVID-19 treatment, its efficacy for cancer was unverified, relying on a small, flawed study, raising serious ethical and regulatory concerns about its use in terminal cases.
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.
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 was n't led by an oncologist.
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