A Colon Cancer Story from 1/8/2022. 300 ml dosage. We got this!
Msg **13377** **1/8/2022**
My wife, Molly, had emergency abdominal surgery in February 2018. Afterwards, she was diagnosed with stage two colon cancer. Two years later, in April 2020, her regular scan showed a small lesion on her liver, adjacent to the original site (now removed). That means that the lesion already contained millions of colon cancer cells. Stage four colon cancer has no real approved treatments. Chemotherapy serves only to prolong life, if you are lucky. I searched about for
immunotherapy trials, but there were only two, to my surprise. One was a basket trial for leronlimab. I contacted CytoDyn and immediately heard back from Dr. Pourhassan, who put me in touch with Dr. Jay Lalezari, in charge of the trial. First,
Molly had to have a biopsy and be tested to see if her lesion, or the area surrounding, was positive for CCR5 receptors.
This took a few weeks, but the result was affirmative. We filled out the forms and had all the medical records sent. Molly and I had Zoom interviews with Dr. Lalezari, and with the oncology consultant for the trial, Dr. Ari Baron. Meanwhile, Molly had already begun weekly chemotherapy in early June.
On the 4th of July weekend we were flying to San Francisco,in the middle of the pandemic. There were people in full hazmat suits on the plane, since the coronavirus was so scary and so unknown. We wiped down the seats and the armrests, and of course wore masks the entire time, since chemotherapy lowers your immune resistance. In San Francisco, CytoDyn put us up at a nice hotel on top of a hill near Lafayette Park, a few blocks from the offices of Quest Research, and we walked
there the next morning. We met Dr. Jay, who gave us a briefing and went over the procedures for the trial. Then his head physician, Dr. Nieves Lopez-Barrera, showed me how to administer the injections, and did the first ones herself. Due to the pandemic, not many people had enrolled in the trial. I think Molly was number eighteen, but not everyone qualified. We
had the next day free to roam the Marin headlands, then took the long flight Molly was very fortunate in that she had zero circulating tumor cells (CTCs). These are like the warriors in a Trojan horse, ready to break out from the tumor and wreak havoc all through the body. Dr. Lopez-Barrera said that some
participants had over a hundred per milliliter of blood. Without the CTCs, the tumor cannot expand to remote sites, to metastasize. With weekly leronlimab injections of **300**
**millilters**, 150 x 2 in the abdomen, Molly continued to register zero CTCs at least through October, when we stopped receiving the monthly reports. At first, she had some rashes near the
injection sites, but over time those became less and less. At the end of September, back in our home state, she had surgery to remove the lesion from her liver. By that time, it had shrunk in diameter by two-thirds, according to my rough calculation. Chemotherapy and immunotherapy continued
side-by-side. Every scan, three months apart, came back negative. The chemotherapy finally came to an end in February 2021. But the leronlimab injections continued, once
per week. In July, we heard that the basket trial was going to wrap up. Would Molly continue to receive leronlimab? There was some dispute on the part of the company, but finally it was
decided to ship the drug not to us, but to her oncologist for another year, directly from CytoDyn. On the advice of the company, however, the dosage has now increased to 2.0 x 2 milliliters, almost the entire vial. Her latest MRI scan last month was again negative. Needless to say, we are grateful to CytoDyn, including Dr. Pourhassan and Dr. Kelly, and to Dr. Jay Lalezari for making this possible. Just yesterday, Dr. Kelly called Molly to see how she was doing, and was calling other participants, as well. I know that for a clinical trial, the company wants to reach “statistical significance,” but the only statistic that matters
to me is that Molly continues to be **healthy and strong**.