Cel-Sci Cancer Drug Claims Crumble (Part 2)

This is the second part of why Cel-Sci's survival claim for Multikine is misleading. To read Cel-Sci Cancer Drug Claims Crumble (Part 1), click here.

Now, let's swing back to Cel-Sci's dubious claim that Multikine extended survival of these 19 head and neck cancer patients by 33% compared with standard of care.

Cel-Sci first launched this canard in a press release issued on Feb. 21, 2006, when it announced the results of a long-term follow-up of the patients in the Hungarian phase II study. The release states:

"The median follow-up period for the patients was 3.2 years. The results of the Phase II trial follow-up study showed that the Multikine-treated patients had substantially increased survival rates and achieved a higher rate of 2-year local regional control as compared to the survival and the 2-year local regional control rates published in the scientific literature (39 clinical trials between 1987 and 2004 in a similar population of head & neck cancer patients)."

Did you catch that? The Multikine-treated patients lived longer than patients collected from 39 totally separate studies published over the course of seven years. Cel-Sci has no data on the real survival benefit of Multikine from a randomized, controlled study, so it arbitrarily compares the drug to studies found in the scientific literature between 1987 and 2004. Why these studies? Why these years? Why not 1986 or 2005? Cel-Sci doesn't say.