Posted on 03/01/2006 11:35:48 AM PST by voletti
China, with lower regulatory hurdles, is racing to a lead in gene therapy. Once a week, Hashmukh Patel, a 62-year-old retired semiconductor engineer from Silicon Valley, travels with his wife, Bena, from their Beijing hotel to Beijing-Haidian Hospital. They ride the crowded elevator to the ninth floor, enter a pleasant, sun-filled ward with private rooms, and Patel gets an injection that he hopes will save his life. Suffering from late-stage cancer of the esophagus, he has come to Beijing for a Chinese gene-therapy drug called Gendicine that's supposed to kill tumor cells. Patel tried just about everything before coming to China. He did three months of traditional chemotherapy, flew to the Bahamas for treatment at an alternative healing center, and tried to find clinical trials of experimental drugs. Nothing panned out. By late 2005, his doctors said that additional surgery or chemo could bring him only a few more months. That wasn't good enough. "I'm not interested in buying time," says Patel, sitting on a couch at Haidian and holding his wife's hand. He had heard about Shenzhen SiBiono GeneTech Co., the producer of Gendicine, which in 2003 became the world's first commercially available gene-therapy drug. But the treatment, which is approved and available only in China, costs $20,000 per two-month course and isn't covered by U.S. health insurance. SETBACKS IN THE U.S. Patel is one of 70 foreign patients from 22 countries who have sought gene-therapy treatment at Haidian from Dr. Li Dinggang in the past year and a half. Li, the 50-year-old director of the Gene Therapy Center, is an oncologist who spent five years as a research fellow at Johns Hopkins University in the 1990s.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessweek.com ...
Probably extracted from farmed aborted babies. Big market for embryos in China. Seriously, if its not therapy manufactured at the expense of the unborn, kudos to them.
My wife's father lived in Shanghai. He most certainly died of cancer after receiving some of that high tech care.
China is probably going to leapfrog the US in biotech in the next 20-30 years. They can test to destruction there.
Interesting. Either our regulators (liberals) don't care about people enough to make this excellent medicine available or the Red Chinese (whom liberals worship) don't care enough about people to protect them from harmful and useless medication. Tough spot for lefties.
Gene therapy's potential is not smoke and mirrors, but this particular endeavor is.
It won't harm anyone, though.
You wouldn't need fetuses for gene therapy.
Gene therapy for cancer in China.
bump for later
And it should not be.
bfl
thanks for the ping. very interesting.
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