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Biotech / Medical : BSD Medical (Long Term Investment Oriented) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: fwhco who wrote (139)	3/20/2013 2:28:46 PM
From: pleonastic	Respond to of 178

Fwco: “Case in point, I had a friend who had colon cancer and received the SOC of colon resection and followup chemo. He was at the 5 year survival point when the cancer returned. His M.D. at Kaiser was ready to give up when Kaiser's SOC was for more chemo which was not working. Almost coincidentally Genentech got approval for Avastin. I asked him if he was getting Avastin. He was not. He later related to me that his oncologist did not know of Avastin's appoval, and my friend had a hell of a time getting Kaiser to approve Avastin for him. Unfortunately, the Avastin did not work very well, either, although it did extend his life expectancy a few months.” I don’t know how long ago your friend died, but he might well be alive today if Avastin (or whatever) had been available in a heat-meltable, micro-encapsulated form. As I’m sure you know, but for those who do not: Using precision heating (BSD Medical’s equipment is outstanding for the task) to raise the temperature of the tumor enough to melt the micro-capsules (circulating in the bloodstream), the drug is deposited only at the tumor. Thus, 1) far higher drug dose levels can be achieved at the tumor and 2) the heated tumor will be much more permeable to the drug (so the drug actually gets out of the blood vessels and into the tumor cells). A higher level of heating might well kill the tumor directly – ablating it, that is. That said, I have not personally seen a report of the BSD-2000 series being used for tumor ablation, which requires much higher temperatures than for the usual “hyperthermia”. Anyone? Have you seen reports of ablation with a 2000 series machine? I want to discuss this a bit, but I’ll do it in another post.

To: fwhco who wrote (139)	3/20/2013 6:00:15 PM
From: geoffrey Wren	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 178

Well, just as consumer products have early adaptors (those who purchased Plasma TV's in 1990 for $4,000 and 1 megapixel cameras in 1994 for $400) and those who did not (most of the rest of us), I suppose the same spread exists among medical equipment procurement decision-makers. I suppose the big operations like Kaiser can get overloaded with Bureaucracy and mired in inertia. Yet they make a claim to be big on taking the "evidence based" approach, so if only we could schedule Pleo for an appointment for the Kaiser Oncology Procurement Department, maybe they'd jump on board. But I suspect they would say they want more studies. My instinct remains that the small ablation machine may be the driver of good things. If it gets generally accepted, the other products would get more attention.