A Start-Up Claimed Its Device Could Cure Cancer. Then Patients Began Dying.
The New York Times
Two U.S. companies teamed up to treat cancer patients using an unproven blood filter in Antigua, out of reach of American regulators.
The private jet took off from the Caribbean island of Antigua in April carrying three highly combustible tanks of compressed oxygen and a terminally ill cancer patient.
Kim Hudlow had chartered the plane for her husband, David. She crouched by his side on the five-hour journey to Florida, frantically adjusting the valve on one of the oxygen tanks as he struggled to breathe. A doctor had just told her he was dying. She was terrified he wouldn’t survive the flight.
It was an abrupt turnaround. Six days earlier, Ms. Hudlow and her husband, who had late-stage esophageal cancer, had arrived on the tropical island full of hope that a novel blood-filtering treatment offered there would save Mr. Hudlow’s life — or at least prolong it.
They were among about two dozen families lured to Antigua by a California start-up called ExThera Medical and its secretive billionaire partner, Alan Quasha.
ExThera, which has about 50 employees, makes a single product: a filter that it says can be used to remove the tumor cells that circulate in patients’ blood and enable cancer to metastasize. Early last year, the company sold thousands of the devices to Mr. Quasha’s private equity firm, Quadrant Management, which began using them on late-stage cancer patients at a small clinic in Antigua.
Quadrant, which invests on behalf of Mr. Quasha and his family and doesn’t have outside investors, charged $45,000 for each course of treatment and advised patients to return to the clinic for regular sessions. It also urged them to abstain from chemotherapy between treatments.
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