MICHELLE L. START Florida Weekly Correspondent

Southwest Florida patients diagnosed with cancer will be some of the first people in the world to have access to technology that may obliterate the diseased cells within seconds - but they will have to wait a little longer until the Food Drug Administration approves human testing.

Last week Dr. Steven Curley, a clinical researcher at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, and Sanibel John Kanzius, inventor of the new cancer fighting system, announced that Lee Memorial Health System will be one of six sites were human trials of the new technology will be performed.

However, researchers said it'll still be some time before human trials.

"There are a whole bunch of steps and a bunch of hoops to get through first," Curley said

While Curley has been using Kanzius' high frequency radio waves and nanoparticles to non-invasively destroy cancerous cells in mice and rabbits for about 18 months now - and noticing no side effects - he said there are numerous expensive toxicity tests that must be completed before moving on to human testing. The toxicity tests can run upwards of $1.5 million each. Additionally, there are feasibility tests, dosing questions and the necessity of proving the machine which has killed cancer cells within 120 seconds in smaller animals can work just as effectively in larger ones.

In order to get to the point where clinical trials can be conducted on humans, more than $8 million will have to be raised through donations to offset the research costs.


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