Comments by "Banana" (@439bananas) on "Real Stories" channel.

  1.  @R3cuzican  You think that because the people have cancer and are already weakened, that the drug may cause a problem in those patients that it would not cause in a healthy patient? That is a valid point and of course it is entirely the case that, that could happen. This is the reason that we have clinical trials. The next stage in clinical trials is that the drug is often tested in a population that has the disease, but are having problems with the standard treatment. Either the normal treatment is no longer effective against the disease OR the normal treatment is giving potentially life threatening side effects in itself. So the experimental drug has a real potential benefit over and above the standard regime. Or the other circumstance is where the person has been determined to be terminally ill and is drinking in last chance saloon. If the drug is judged to be efficacious in those groups it then passes to a double blind test. In this the patients are randomly assigned the standard treatment or the trial drug. At the half way point in the trial they change drugs to the other drug and at the end of the trial the results are analysed. During the whole period, death rates between the groups are continuously monitored and if there was a problem then the trial would be stopped early and the groups unmasked so that the best treatment could be administered. It typically takes between 8 and 12 years to get a drug from the lab bench and into general use.
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  2. Wow I cloned the cell line that makes that drug from a b7g2b genetic switch back. Hope your arthritis/crohn's disease is responding well?
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  3. People here do not always have a great choice. If you are unemployed and debts build up, you'd most probably do anything. At least it is legal.
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  4. Sorry, but it is extremely difficult to leave someone who is abusive, not because you love them, but because you are terrified what they will do if you leave.
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  5. Hope that was a joke? The drug is a monoclonal antibody not a virus.
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  6. Go back and ask what you were given, if they refuse, start to quote informed consent laws.
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  7. With these drugs they are targetted to a particular epitope associated with the disease, the purpose of what they were doing was to elucidate any side effects of the drug.
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  8. I used to work making clinical trials drugs. The reality is that a lot of things that would have happened in series in a normal drug trial have happened in parallel in this trial. So usually, there are chemical tests in a lab, then a round of meetings with investors and ethics committees and if all is well, then there are tests in tissue culture on isolated cells. If a drug passes this there will be more rounds of meetings with ethics and investors and then the drug goes into rats or mice. These stage have just been run at the same time and the usual round of endless meetings and funding problems have been circumvented. Nothing is 100% safe, that is a fact, there are just degrees of safety with anything.
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  9.  @MsTinkerbelle87  This is the thing, most people understand how vaccines work and will go and have the vaccine because they realise that having the vaccine will produce less side effects than catching COVID. The problem is that vaccines are not 100% effective, some people do not mount a sufficient immune response to the vaccine due to a poor immune system. If you add that to the number of people that are refusing the vaccine, then there is the potential for this to rumble on for a number of years; the problem with that being that the more it is passed around the more opportunity there is for a mutant strain to arise that is so different from the original strain that the vaccine is ineffective against it.
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  10. Usually, blood samples would be taken as part of the investigation of the drug.
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  11. Animal tests before human tests are mandated by the Geneva convention
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  12. No, even in this scenario the experimenters have a duty of care to the volunteers that is enshrined in UK law. If a case like this came to court, because the drug testers did not follow well established protocols for administering monoclonal antibodies, it would be likely that they would be found guilty of gross negligence. I was involved in the development of CAMPATH.
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  13. Clinical trials drugs are initially given to healthy people so that its actions can be differentiated from the disease it is being used to treat.
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  14. Because the Geneva convention forbids it, remember the Nazis?
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  15. There was an out of court settlement for in excess of £2 million, as the testing company still had a duty of care to its guinea pigs. There were established protocols for administering monoclonal antibodies. I was involved with the development of CAMPATH, this drug came in a 5-10ml format which was diluted into a litre of isotonic intravenous drip. It was infused at a fairly slow rate, so if problems arose, you could stop infusing the drug and by extension limit the damage. It was also wise to have prednisolone and adrenaline on standby , in case of serious reactions. Where you are trying out a drug for the first time, it also would have made sense to leave at least 30 minutes between administering doses to individual volunteers. None of these precautions were taken in the trial. Therefore had the matter come before a court of law the victims would have had a good case for negligence.
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  16.  @shielamariehankinson3824  Well to be quiet honest if there are no approved drugs left then all anyone is left with are the experimental ones. There was one young patient called Nicola Coles that we treated, she had extreme vasculitis and she was on the brink of death, the doctors did not think that she would survive. This was '92 or '93, her parents were offered the opportunity of taking one of our experimental drugs, they agreed and the drug kept her alive. It did eventually stop working for her, but it bought her condition under control and bought her time. As a result, she had an extra 25+ years of life. If you put Prof John Isaacs in the youtube search box you will be able to hear some of the story of her treatment from her doctor's viewpoint.
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  17. People who are abusive are incredibly manipulative. To escape my ex, I had to give up my career, move 126 miles away and cut contact with all my friends. I am not on the electoral roll and even my doctor does not have my correct address. When my ex was arrested for attacking wife number 2, the police were so worried that they could not locate me, they contacted my parents. My ex was on remand in prison for 3 weeks, when wife 2 rescinded her statement and we believe that she fled the country.
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  18. No one would have known who received the placebo/saline injection until the others showed an adverse reaction, but the black guy didn't because he got the placebo.
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  19. Others may be too traumatised to speak or may have signed non-disclosure agreements in return for out of court settlements. This is what big business does in response to such worries that nefarious practices might be revealed
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  20. Venables has clearly not changed and should be locked up for life. The other sounds rehabilitated. Should have been given a life sentence and parole should mean that if they are in any more serious trouble like Venables, then the rest of the sentence should be imposed.
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  21. Out of court settlements in excess of £2 million
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  22. For monoclonal antibodies which is the class of drugs that this fell into, there are established protocols that the clinic failed to follow. So they should have diluted the drug in 500ml of IV fluid and infused it slowly over an hour or so. That way if a problem starts to show then you can stop the infusion and treat the symptoms and the person has not received the whole dose. Cytokine storms, such as the ones described here are a known risk for this category of drug and for this reason, you really need to have an anti-inflammatory steroid called Prednisolone on standby to treat this sort of reaction.
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  23. In the UK donors are not paid and a proportion of the blood is fractionated and sold, just the same.
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  24. They don't use women because our lifetime supply of ova is preformed at birth and it would be unethical to damage them, men, however, make sperm continuously, so not such an issue
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  25.  @aftaflash  To elucidate that any side effects are caused by the drug and not disease progression.
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  26. In the UK a protocol is agreed with an ethics committee to keep people safe, I suspect that this was not followed.
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  27. The effect of giving a supposed medicine has to be discounted so that the results can be confirmed as a real effect.
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  28. The problem is that until recently, the courts allowed perpetrators to have unsupervised access to their children and then the abuser would use that as a pretext to continue the abuse. That is what happened in my divorce ten years ago. My ex had been abusive and I called the police after he tried to run me over, I was only slightly injured and the police did not record it as domestic violence, but as a road traffic accident. During a fact-finding hearing, the Judge described my evidence as an exercise in hyperbole and granted my ex unsupervised access. I told my solicitor about what was going on during the handovers and said that I intended to go to the police about it. He told me not to, as he said that the particular judge would take a dim view and see it as trying to frustrate his orders and as such I could be held in contempt of court and lose residency. He told me just to try to sell up and move as quickly as possible. I had no choice but to take the first offer on my house and go. My ex took it back to court, saying that I was frustrating contact by moving. This time I represented myself, as I knew if needs be I could plead ignorance on the finer points of the law and not being a lawyer, I stood a good chance of getting away with it. The defence that I used was that my ex was being abusive at handovers in front of my son and that moving meant that my parents could handle the handovers thereby lessening the chance of our son seeing this sort of conflict and being distressed by it. The opposition claimed that I was lying, so I proffered video evidence, they immediately tried to stop this being shown by saying that my ex had not consented to the handovers being filmed. I came back with the fact that it was filmed on property that solely belonged to me and that they would show whether or not my evidence was true or fictitious. They came back with some legal argument and I managed to counter that in cases involving children that the overriding concern should be the safety and the welfare of the child. That did it, the footage was viewed and contact was bought to an end. Given the amount of damage this relationship has done to my own life, it does not take much imagination to see that when children are bought up with this as their relationship model this is what they take into life as what a relationship should look like.
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  29. Should add ex went on to marry again and was violent in that relationship too. The police contacted me and told me. He spent 3 weeks on remand in prison over one Christmas KARMA
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  30.  @russellbiggs9622  At least you had 8 years without seeing violence. The problem is that it is so difficult to get away from these types. In the end, I moved 126 miles away, gave up my career and cut all contact with all my friends. I am not on the electoral roll and cannot vote or have a credit card and I am not identifiable on social media either, even my own doctor does not know my real address. When my ex attacked wife number 2, the police could not locate me and had to contact my parents, because they thought that something worse had happened to me. The police were not too surprised at the disappearing act and said that they thought he was really dangerous. The problem with a disappearing act is that it takes time and guts to arrange and you have to be prepared to break the law to disappear ie not on the electoral roll and not your real address on driving license etc. Most women are so downtrodden that they lack any sort of plan, whereas I was determined to get away.
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  31. Monoclonal antibodies provoke an immune response which can go nuts and become a cytokine storm. The drug should have been diluted in a litre of buffered saline and infused slowly over an hour with prednisolone on standby to deal with any adverse reaction.
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  32. You have to test new drugs on patients not suffering from the disease to differentiate between symptoms caused by the disease and side effects of the drug.
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  33. By this stage protocols existed for the administration of monoclonal antibodies that were a long way past the stage in trials that this drug was. First mistake, when you first give the drug it needs to be diluted in a drip of half to a litre and you SLOWLY infuse this into the patient. If something goes wrong you can stop the infusion, so the patient receives a minimal dose. Second mistake, they should have had an anti inflammatory steroid called Prednisolone on standby in case of this sort of reaction.
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  34. Not enough testing done? It takes between 8 and 12 years for a new drug to go from lab bench, through all the clinical trials to your doctor's prescribing pad and the vast majority of them do not make it that far.
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  35. First of all, when the heart is no longer beating the blood coagulates really quickly and so it is no good by the time it is removed during embalming. When you take blood for other purposes then either heparin is added to keep it from clotting or the collection is made into a sterile container with sterile glass beads in it, you then swirl the container until a clot forms around the beads.
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  36. Drugs have to be tested on people without the disease first to differentiate the drug's effects from the effects of the disease.
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  37. Sadly the Geneva convention means that all medicines must be tested in animals prior to human trials. It is not the intention to hurt anyone, merely to prove safety as one of the hurdles in getting a new drug to market
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  38. Not the way that monoclonal antibodies work. They only latch on to certain epitopes that are unique to cancer. The problem was caused by the bodies immune reaction to the drug as an unrecognised protein.
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  39. Because you want to elucidate the effects of the drug as opposed to disease progression.
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  40. These drugs are not illegal, they are clinical trials drugs
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  41. The Geneva Convention mandates that experimental drugs are tested in animals before humans, this is not down to the scientists but down to the law. Regardless of the fact that the guys were paid, the clinical trials company had a duty of care to them. They failed in that they failed to follow pre-existing protocols for the administration of monoclonal antibodies. The correct procedure is to dilute the drug in a litre of buffered saline and infuse the dose intravenously over the period of an hour. If someone becomes ill the infusion can be stopped and hopefully the adverse effects are dose dependent. They should also have had prednisolone on standby, as this mitigates the predictable cytokine storm.
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  42.  @juhpeq  No the reality is that monoclonal antibodies are developed to latch on to a molecular combination on the exterior of the cancer cell, the combination that is chosen is UNIQUE to that cancer cell so it provides a targeted response. The problem comes because the drug itself is quite a big protein and the body 'sees' it as being foreign to the body and not 'belonging', this means the body launches its immune system into action, the result is the sort of cytokine storm that was seen in this instance. This is a known side effect of this class of drugs and existing protocols say that you should have an anti-inflammatory steroid called Prednisolone on standby to knock back any reaction to a safe level.
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  43. That it was effective at a lower dosage or that the reaction could be controlled with anti inflammatories?
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  44. There were existing protocols. I worked on CAMPATH and that was diluted in isotonic PBS and infused slowly with prednisolone and adrenaline on stand by in case of serious reactions. The trials were run negligently.
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  45. Yes, it most definitely is.
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  46. Many clinical trials drugs are tried on tissue cell cultures before being tested on first animals and then humans. But you can not replicate the effects on whole organ systems in that way.
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  47. I bet Prednisolone would have done the job.
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  48. It does not matter what religion you are, to beat someone who is weaker than yourself is wrong. If you are unhappy with your spouse then it is time to either get counselling or leave.
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  49. Unlikely that anyone will be jailed, volunteers probably paid off by insurance in exchange for signing a non disclosure agreement.
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  50. These people had a case because the company still has a duty of care to carry out the trial with a degree of care to the participants. In this case, there existed the knowledge that monoclonal antibody drugs can provoke cytokine storms and that to avoid that there were well established procedures, that the clinical trials company failed to follow. For this reason, they could potentially be found negligent in a court of law.
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