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Thread: The Kanzius Machine - man with no formal training invents plausible cancer treatment

  1. #1
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    The Kanzius Machine - man with no formal training invents plausible cancer treatment

    Touching story. It's actually pretty strange that this works. One would think that the nanoparticles are too small to couple to radiowaves. Maybe this is some sort of collective effect or some other novel physics phenomenon.

    The Kanzius Machine: A Cancer Cure?, Inventor Tells 60 Minutes He Hopes To Live Long Enough To See Machine Cure Humans - CBS News
    CBS News Video - Top Stories and Video News Clips at CBSNews.com
    CBS News Video - Top Stories and Video News Clips at CBSNews.com

    The Kanzius Machine: A Cancer Cure?
    April 13, 2008(CBS) What if we told you that a guy with no background in science or medicine-not even a college degree-has come up with what may be one of the most promising breakthroughs in cancer research in years?

    Well it's true, and if you think it sounds improbable, consider this: he did it with his wife's pie pans and hot dogs.

    His name is John Kanzius, and he's a former businessman and radio technician who built a radio wave machine that has cancer researchers so enthusiastic about its potential they're pouring money and effort into testing it out.

    Here's the important part: if clinical trials pan out-and there's still a long way to go-the Kanzius machine will zap cancer cells all through your body without the need for drugs or surgery and without side effects. None at all. At least that's the idea.


    The last thing John Kanzius thought he'd ever do was try to cure cancer. A former radio and television executive from Pennsylvania, he came to Florida to enjoy his retirement.

    "I have no business being in the cancer business. It’s not something that a layman like me should be in, it should be left to doctors and research people," he told correspondent Lesley Stahl.

    "But sometimes it takes an outsider," Stahl remarked.

    "Sometimes it just - maybe you get lucky," Kanzius replied.

    It was the worst kind of luck that gave Kanzius the idea to use radio waves to kill cancer cells: six years ago, he was diagnosed with terminal leukemia and since then has undergone 36 rounds of toxic chemotherapy. But it wasn't his own condition that motivated him, it was looking into the hollow eyes of sick children on the cancer ward at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

    "I saw the smiles of youth and saw their spirits were broken. And you could see that they were sort of asking, 'Why can't they do something for me?'" Kanzius told Stahl.

    "So they started to haunt you. The children," Stahl asked.
    "Their faces. I still remember them holding on their Teddy bears and so forth," he replied. "And shortly after that I started my own chemotherapy, my third round of chemotherapy."

    Kanzius told Stahl the chemotherapy made him very sick and that he couldn't sleep at night. "And I said, 'There’s gotta be a better way to treat cancer.'"

    It was during one of those sleepless nights that the light bulb went off. When he was young, Kanzius was one of those kids who built radios from scratch, so he knew the hidden power of radio waves. Sick from chemo, he got out of bed, went to the kitchen, and started to build a radio wave machine.

    "Started looking in the cupboard and I saw pie pans and I said, 'These are perfect. I can modify these,'" he recalled.

    His wife Marianne woke up that night to a lot of banging and clamoring. "I was concerned truthfully that he had lost it," she told Stahl.

    "She felt sorry for me," Kanzius added.

    "I did," Marianne Kanzius acknowledged. "And I had mentioned to him, 'Honey, the doctors can't-you know, find an answer to cancer. How can you think that you can?'"

    That's what 60 Minutes wanted to know, so Stahl went to his garage laboratory to find out.

    Here's how it works: one box sends radio waves over to the other, creating enough energy to activate gas in a fluorescent light. Kanzius put his hand in the field to demonstrate that radio waves are harmless to humans.

    "So right from the beginning you're trying to show that radio waves could activate gas and not harm the human-anything else," Stahl remarked. "'Cause you're looking for some kind of a treatment with no side effects, that's what's in your head."

    "No side effects," Kanzius replied.

    But how could he focus the radio waves to destroy cancer cells?

    "That was the next $64,000 question," Kanzius said.

    The answer would cost much more than that. Kanzius spent about $200,000 just to have a more advanced version of his machine built. He knew that metal heats up when it's exposed to high-powered radio waves. So what if a tumor was injected with some kind of metal, and zapped with a focused beam of radio waves? Would the metal heat up and kill the cancer cells, but leave the area around them unharmed? He did his first test with hot dogs.

    "I'm going to inject it with some copper sulfate," Kanzius explained, demonstrating the machine. "And I’m going to take the probe right at the injection site."

    Kanzius placed the hot dog in his radio wave machine, and Stahl watched to see if the temperature would rise in that one area where the metal solution was and nowhere else.

    "And when I saw it start to go up I said, 'Eureka, I've done it,'" Kanzius remembered. "And I said, 'God, I gotta shut this off and see whether it's still cold down below.' So I shut it off, took my probe, went down here where it wasn’t injected. And the temperature dropped back down. And I said, 'God, maybe I got something here.'"

    Kanzius thought he had found a way attack cancer cells without the collateral damage caused by chemotherapy and radiation. Today, his invention is in the laboratories of two major research centers - the University of Pittsburgh and M.D. Anderson, where Dr. Steven Curley, a liver cancer surgeon, is testing it.

    "This technology may allow us to treat just about any kind of cancer you can imagine," Dr. Curley told Stahl. "I've gotta tell you, in 20 years of research this is the most exciting thing that I’ve encountered."

    That's because Kanzius impressed Curley with another remarkable idea: to combine the radio waves from his device with something cutting edge - space age nanoparticles made of metal or carbon. They are so small that thousands of them can fit in a single cancer cell. Because they’re metallic, Kanzius was hoping his radio waves would them heat up and kill the cancer.

    "If these nanoparticles work then we truly have something huge here," Kanzius told Stahl.

    Enter Rick Smalley, another cancer patient at M.D. Anderson and the man who won the Nobel Prize for discovering nanoparticles made from carbon. As luck would have it, Dr. Curley was called in one day to examine Smalley. Before leaving, he asked him for some of his nanoparticles.

    "I proceeded to tell him what I wanted to do and that I thought they would heat. He looked at me with sort of a studied long look and didn’t say anything. And then he looked at me and said, 'It won’t work,'" Curley remembered. "And just laughed and said, 'Well, look, I'll give you some. But don't be too disappointed.'"

    So Dr. Curley brought a vial of those precious nanoparticles to John Kanzius.

    And on an August day in 2005, Curley and Kanzius put them to the test. Would the metallic nanoparticles heat up enough to kill cancer?

    "So we take the nanoparticles, we put 'em in the radio field. And in about 15 seconds, they’re boiling and heating and Steve Curley couldn't contain himself. He called Rick Smalley and he said, 'Rick, you’re not going to believe this. He just blew the smithereens out of your nanoparticles,'" Kanzius recalled.

    Smalley's response? "The only thing that I got out of him after this pause was, “Holy s…,'" Curley recalled.

    Not long after that day, Smalley died of lymphoma. Once a skeptic, he had become one of Kanzius' biggest supporters.

    "He didn’t expect it, but he embraced it to his death bed when he told Dr. Curley this will change medicine forever. Don't stop, no matter what you do," Kanzius told Stahl.

    And they haven't stopped. They’ve already shown that the Kanzius machine can heat nanoparticles and cook cancer to death in animals. Dr. Curley with rabbits, and in Pittsburgh, Dr. David Geller demonstrated to 60 Minutes how he used nanoparticles, made from gold, to kill liver cancer cells grown in rats.

    "Now what we’re going to do is inject the nanoparticles," Dr. Geller explained. "Directly into the tumor."

    In the study the rats, anesthetized to keep them still, were exposed to the Kanzius radio waves. Dr. Geller later examined their tumors under a microscope.

    "What you can see is that cells are starting to fall apart. You see white spaces in between them. The body of the cell is shrinking, the cells are starting to die," Geller pointed out.

    "And can you tell from this whether the area surrounding the tumor had any destruction?" Stahl asked.

    "Grossly inspecting the animal, we did not see not see any damage to the surrounding tissue," Geller said.

    So far, the Kanzius method has only been applied to solid, localized tumors in animals. The ultimate goal is to treat cancer that has metastasized or spread to other parts of the body. Those undetectable rogue cells are what most often kill people with cancer and the trick is finding them.

    "If we can't target the microscopic cells this is not going to be a cure," Curley said.

    That’s why Curley is trying to use special molecules that are programmed to target cancer cells and attach nanoparticles to them.

    He showed Stahl an animation of how he hopes the targeting will work in people one day, with a simple injection of gold nanoparticles into the bloodstream.

    "What we’re seeing here is an example of a gold nanoparticle in this case with an antibody on it, so the antibody would be the targeting molecule," Curley explained. "You can see it is tiny compared to a normal red blood cell just imagine all of these billions of these gold nanoparticles circulating through the body and then once they get into the blood vessels going to the tumor, these nanoparticles would go through and bind on the surface of the cell."

    "The cancer cell. It wouldn't bind on a normal cell," Stahl observed.

    "That's right, they would bind only to the cancer cell. Now here’s the nanoparticles in the cell, here comes John's radio frequency treatment. The cells get hot and they’re destroyed," Curley said.

    "Gosh, it does look like one of those science fiction movies," Stahl remarked.

    "Right now it is a little science fiction," Curley agreed. "We’re not quite to the real time yet, but it’s got a lot of promise."

    Even if all goes well in the lab, it'll be at least another four years before human trials can start. But John Kanzius says he's afraid he doesn't have that much time. So to help speed up the research, he's been raising millions of dollars and getting press coverage about his invention.

    "Now I can't count the number of times the journalistic community, has done stories on a cancer cure," Stahl said. "I did one in 1973. …How many times have we seen these things work in the Petri dish, work with animals. And then you get them into humans and they don’t work."

    "Dozens," Curley replied.

    But if this one does work, it most likely won't be developed in time to help the man who invented it. John Kanzius may have the option of a bone marrow transplant that could buy him more time, but after six years of chemo it would be another grueling ordeal.

    "Did you ever say, 'I’m not going to do this anymore. I’m not going to put myself through it,'?" Stahl asked.

    "Yes. I said that-only about a year and a half ago," Kanzius replied. "I changed my mind because I think with all the research that’s going on with the institutions, that maybe, I'd like to be around for the first patient to get treated and just have a smile."

    "Oh my God," Stahl said.

    "And then I don't care anymore," Kanzius replied.


    Produced by Tanya Simon
    © MMVIII, CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.

  2. #2
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    What a wonderful story. I so hope it's true. We have to wait four years before we find out.
    Semper in excretum. Solum profunda variat.

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    Here's another promising treatment with a touching story behind it. This one is already in clinical trials:

    CURIOUS . Stories » Q&A: Mark Davis | Thirteen/WNET
    CURIOUS . Stories » Watch the Full Episode: “Survival” | Thirteen/WNET
    When Mark Davis, a chemical engineer, found out that his wife, Mary, had cancer, helping her survive devastating chemotherapy treatments became his mission. Her treatments became so unbearable that she pleaded with her husband to find a better way. “You can fix this,” she challenged him, and so began a scientific odyssey that led Davis to create IT-101, a revolutionary cancer drug. In the following Q&A, Davis discusses the drug he created and the hope it has already brought.

    Q. How and why has cancer been so difficult to treat after so many years?

    DAVIS: Cancer is really not a single disease - it is really over a 100 different types of diseases. What I mean by this is that lung cancer is different from breast cancer that is different of other types of cancer. Additionally, cancer is your own cells “gone mad” so the recognition of them from yourself is very difficult. These and other issues make cancer a very difficult disease to treat. However, the molecular level understanding of cancer is progressing at a very fast pace now and I believe that we will see spectacular advances in the near future as we exploit this new understanding.

    Q. Please provide a quick background on how you came to develop IT-101.

    DAVIS: This is the Curious story. I am an engineer so my approach was to ask what are the essential features that would need to be done to create a new cancer therapeutic that could overcome some of the current limitations. While one can never completely answer the question, certain issues could be defined. I then began to think about how to design a material and system to address those issues. That approach has yielded IT-101 and other new therapeutics that are now coming along behind IT-101. The key was not to take known materials and try to “bandage them up” to make them work, but rather to start from the beginning and build a system that is designed to function appropriately for the specific job.

    Q. How does IT-101 differ from traditional cancer treatments? How is it unique?

    DAVIS: Again, this is the Curious story. The way I describe it - it is the first de novo designed cancer medicine to reach humans.

    Q. Did you have any previous experience with medical or biological research prior to developing IT-101?

    DAVIS: Yes. My undergraduate training was in chemical engineering and pre-med. One of my undergraduate research projects was on nerve function. However, as a faculty member, I did not work on this until after Mary contracted breast cancer.

    Q. How is your wife doing now?

    DAVIS: She is doing fine. At this point, it is the chemo damage that affects her life, e.g., loss of high frequency hearing.

    Q. Can you briefly outline and explain the FDA’s clinical trial process and what the different stages are?

    DAVIS: Phase I - is it safe and what dose can be given to patients in a safe manner? What are the side effects and are they acceptable? Phase II - first look at how effective it is in a patient population large enough to be able to generate responses that can have statistical significance. Phase III - pivotal studies with large patient populations to see if the proposed therapy (dose level, dose schedule) provides any advance over current therapies.

    Q. Where does the IT-101 trial stand now?

    DAVIS: It is finishing the Phase I trial and will be moving into several Phase II trials (Phase I can be for all types of cancer but Phase II has to be in specific cancer types).

    Q. Were you surprised at the initial success of the trial?

    DAVIS: Yes. Especially at the first dosing showing effects.

    Q. Has your research been specific to the kind of cancer your first trial patient, Ray Natha, has?

    DAVIS: Ray has metastatic pancreatic cancer. IT-101 is not specific to that cancer. Our research has emphasized the creation of new therapeutics that would be broadly applicable to many types of cancer.

    Q. How have the trial results compared in people with other types of cancer? Have they been similar?

    DAVIS: Other patients have other cancer types. We are seeing effects in other cancer types but I am not able to provide you specific details.

    Q. How did your relationship with City of Hope get established?

    DAVIS: It was through Mary being treated there.

    Q. How is Ray Natha doing today?

    DAVIS: Ray is still be treated on compassionate use. He remains stable!

    Q. What happens to patients after a trial concludes? Do they still have access to the treatments?

    DAVIS: Thus far, patients who have successfully concluded the six-month trial are placed on compassionate use.

    Q. Where can people go for an opportunity to participate in trials of experimental drugs?

    DAVIS: There is a Web site that lists all the clinical trials ongoing.

    Q. What are your hopes for the future of cancer treatment? Might there one day be a prophylactic approach to treatment, whereby patients can take preventative or maintenance drugs?

    DAVIS: As I say, this is my dream - prophylactic use. We are, in fact, working on the concept of maintenance therapy right now. It is the logical step toward ultimately getting to prophylatic use.

    Q. If all goes well, when do you expect IT-101 to be approved by the FDA and on the market?

    DAVIS: Three to seven years.

    Q. Have you ever been featured in a documentary like CURIOUS?

    DAVIS: No.

    Q. Do you think the kind of visibility PBS will bring to you and your work could help with the FDA approval process, and with funding this and other research?

    DAVIS: I don’t know about the approval process. My guess would be that it can’t hurt but I am skeptical that it will really help. I definitely hope that it helps in some way though. At this point, it could help get patients to fill our trials faster and that could ultimately help the approval process move quicker. However, I am sure many positives that I have not thought about will come out of the PBS show.

    Q. What other research are you working on now?

    DAVIS: In addition to our work on therapeutics, we are working on creating new materials for moving ions. Why is this important? We are attempting to synthesize materials to make safer and longer-lasting batteries.

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