Transcript Disclaimer – Please note that the following transcription has been machine generated by an AI software and therefore may include errors and ommissions.

Robin Daly
Hello and welcome to the Yes to Life show on UK Health Radio. My name’s Robin Daly and I shall be hosting the show as usual. I’m also the founder of Yes to Life, the UK charity that works to introduce integrative medicine into the UK for cancer care and to help those who have cancer to learn about and access the benefits that it has to offer. Today, I’m going to be speaking to a doctor who’s been building on his background in hematology, treating blood cancers, to develop a less destructive and aggressive way of treating the disease than the standard protocols. I’m speaking to Dr. Maharaj in Florida, USA. Hi Dr. Maharaj, very pleased to be introduced to you and your work and thanks for being my guest on the Yes to Life show today. Thank you.

Dr Maharaj
Well, Robin, thank you so much. It’s a pleasure to meet you and thank you for having me on the show today.

Robin Daly
So I’m talking to you in Florida, USA today.

Dr Maharaj
That’s correct. Yes, we’re based at Pointon Beach in Florida.

Robin Daly
but I believe you started your medical career over here in the UK. Yeah. Did you actually grow up in the UK?

Dr Maharaj
I was born in Trinidad, but I spent formative years in the UK, and so I was educated. I did my medical training at the University of Glasgow, where I trained in internal medicine or general medicine, as it’s referred to in the UK, and then I specialized in hematology and then further specialized in hematological oncology and bone marrow transplantation.

Robin Daly
Right. Okay. So, and you worked in the NHS for a period?

Dr Maharaj
I worked, in fact, throughout my time in the United Kingdom, I worked in the National Health Service. Yes.

Robin Daly
So, what prompted the leap to Florida then?

Dr Maharaj
Well, there were several things. First of all, I became a consultant at a very early stage in my career, and so I felt at that time I wanted to continue my interest in exploring further what we had been working on at the University of Glasgow in terms of pioneering autologous bone marrow transplantation. And the mechanisms by which that procedure would work, and so then I was offered a position at the University of Miami to develop the bone marrow transplant program and be involved in the development of the bone marrow transplant program. So that’s what prompted me to move to Florida.

Robin Daly
Mmm, yeah, enticing. Okay, so once you’re there in Florida, you’ve developed some new stuff for people needing bone marrow transplants that’s likely to have a large impact on their experience. So before you tell us about that, I wonder, I mean, there’s going to be listeners who are unaware of what’s normally involved in a bone marrow transplant or even why they’re carried out. So can you give us the basics?

Dr Maharaj
Yes. I mean, a bone marrow transplant is really a form of immunotherapy. Initially, it was developed as a way to be able to kill cancer cells, which if you use the analogy of standard chemotherapy is like a small hammer destroying the cancer. Well, if you consider a sledgehammer, then that would be essentially what prompted the development of bone marrow transplants because our feeling traditionally had been that the way to kill cancer is to give it chemotherapy and just keep increasing the dose of the chemotherapy until we eventually destroyed it. Hence, the sledgehammer approach versus the regular hammer approach for the sledgehammer being the bone marrow transplant. But when you take chemotherapy, as you increase the dose of chemotherapy, what tends to happen is you destroy normal tissues in the process.

Dr Maharaj
And what would happen is that the bone marrow being the organ that forms the cells of the blood and the immune system, that would be one of the first organs to begin to go down. That’s, for example, why when people get chemotherapy, they’re susceptible to infections because cells and the immune cells are being destroyed by the chemotherapy. Well, if you can imagine, you’d use a sledgehammer approach. You could just destroy the cells forming the blood and the immune system completely. And so it was developed for blood cancers because that’s where the problem lay. And so what we would do is we would destroy that diseased bone marrow, but we would use stem cells either from a donor or if the patient was in remission, we would collect some of their own stem cells, then use the sledgehammer and put the cells back in. And in this way, we rescue the patient. So that essentially was the basic idea of what a bone marrow transplant would be.

Robin Daly
Interesting, isn’t it? It was a kind of mode of thinking at that time, wasn’t it? And it went alongside high dose chemo, of course, which is another similar idea. Yes. Where you actually give people enough chemo to kill them. But you rescue them with some of their own sentiles, which you’ve harvested in advance. Correct. They both seemed like great ideas at the time, but I don’t think they’ve really proven their worth in the long term.

Dr Maharaj
Well, I think that a bone marrow transplant can be curative, both for using an individual’s own stem cells, as well as, and certainly in the case of blood cancers, the success of it has been proven. And so this is one of the reasons why I went to the University of Miami, because we were pioneering a lot of these treatments for which patients with cancer didn’t have other options. And so these treatments were showing that, in fact, we were extending the lives of patients with these different procedures, with the transplant procedure. So to say that it doesn’t work is not entirely correct. However, the issues with it would be the complexities of the toxicities or the side effects associated with giving these high dosages of chemotherapy. And what we’ve learned is that the way it works is not necessarily the effect of the chemotherapy.

Dr Maharaj
Certainly, the chemotherapy will decrease the size and the burden of what we call the tumor. But the reason why that procedure works is because of what we call the recovery of the immune system of the individual with the cancer. So it’s either the patient’s own immune system is recovering or the fact that it’s the donor’s stem cells that form the immune system is recovering and getting rid of the cancer cells and preventing the cancer from recurring because of what we call reinstatement of immune surveillance.

Robin Daly
Right, so as a kind of wake -up call, the sort of sledgehammer, is a wake -up call to our own immune system to do the job. Yes, yes, yeah. Interesting, so that yeah that wasn’t the idea at the time, was it? It was supposed to be the actual treatment that was doing it, but it’s interesting to see that it’s now being seen to prompt our own system to do a lot of the work.

Dr Maharaj
Yes. It was that which led me to begin to think again about what we were doing to the patients by giving them these high dosages of chemotherapy and also understanding that the real effect was coming from the immune system that made me rethink. What made me rethink about doing the procedure was the fact that patients were surviving long enough that now they were beginning to come back with secondary cancers. Those secondary cancers were caused by the damage to their normal stem cells by the high dose chemotherapy. I felt that if we could harness the effect of what we achieved with the recovery of the immune system and we could actually then have to avoid giving these huge dosages of chemotherapy, we could come up with a way to be able to minimize the side effects, reduce the side effects to the patients, but at the same time get good results because we were now restoring their immune systems.

Dr Maharaj
That’s what led me to the approach that I take now, which is defined as personalized precision immunotherapy. What that means is personalized because often when we treat patients, we put patients with cancer into clinical studies. We treat everyone with colon cancer based upon their stages using approaches with protocols, which says stage one should get this protocol, stage two, this protocol, stage three, stage four. That’s essentially how we categorize patients in terms of their treatments. That requires when you develop a treatment, it requires a certain number of patients in a study to be able to say that this treatment is better than the best care at the time. Or in a randomized study, you give no treatment, you give the treatment, and you say that the treatments are sure to benefit.

Dr Maharaj
But in a personalized precision approach, we’re saying that each cancer patient is an individual and their characteristics are different. Therefore, if we understand and we measure their characteristics of what makes them unique and we treat those characteristics, we’re going to get a different outcome. The approach I use now is that instead of saying we need to study an N number of 50 patients in randomized 25 to 25, we say N equals one and where the control is actually the patient themselves before the treatment. After the treatment, now we objectively have been able to show where the patient is because now we’re looking at the results of that individual patient rather than combining the results of 50 patients and saying that the treatment works.

Robin Daly
Interesting. Well, look, I want to go into a lot more detail about exactly how you develop this protocol and how you’re working. Before we do, we just want to finish up on sort of traditional bone marrow transplants because, again, a lot of people listening won’t be aware of what the process of having a bone marrow transplant is like. We said there’s a lot of side effects. We said it’s difficult, but maybe you could just explain what having a bone marrow transplant looks like. Yes.

Dr Maharaj
So, the process will first of all be determined by the eligibility of the patient for the bone marrow transplant. So, there are certain, first of all, the disease, the type of disease. And the disease is most commonly treated now with a bone marrow transplant to patients with leukemia, acute leukemias, lymphomas, and multiple myelomas, predominantly the blood cancers. Now, I’m simplifying it because if you look at the medical conditions that have been treated, which successfully with bone marrow transplants, there are over 80 diseases because men include disorders of the immune system, include disorders of bone marrow failure. But I’m simplifying it by saying the three most common tends to be those cancers. So, the first of all is determining if the patient, if there is evidence to show that a bone marrow transplant has worked in the particular type of cancer that we’re evaluating.

Dr Maharaj
The second stage is that the patient undergoes certain evaluations to determine that what the dose of chemotherapy we’re giving, which is usually can vary between 20 to 200 times the standard dose, that their organ function, like their brain, liver, heart, kidneys, lungs, they’re going to be able to withstand that dose of chemotherapy. Because if there’s any condition which is affecting those organs, the risk of basically dying from the procedure is very high. And so, after the patients have been selected, they’re usually given a lot of education about the outcomes as well as the side effects and the potential side effects, the recovery, the risk of infections, which is one of the major one, the risk of death, which is another complication associated with the procedure.

Dr Maharaj
And then once the patient is selected, usually they’re given what’s called a conditioning regimen. But before we get to that point, we either determine if they’ve got a donor and the donor requires matching with the patient, HLA matching, or if they’re going to be their own donors, which is basically now they’re in a situation to be able to have their own stem cells collected and stored for them. So that process, so two types of transplants are bone marrow transplant. One is from a donor, the other one is from the patient. And if we’re going to use the one from the patient, we’ve got to collect the stem cells from the patient before. And that’s usually collected over a period of about a week. They’re given, sometimes they’re just given a growth factor called GCSF and the cells are collected. But more frequently in the regimens, they’re often given a combination of a sort of medium dose of chemotherapy plus the GCSF growth factor to stimulate the stem cells to be released from the bone marrow into the blood.

Dr Maharaj
And those stem cells are collected by a procedure called apheresis. And those cells are then frozen. In the case of the allogeneic transplant, the donor is selected and then given the growth factor GCSF over a period of five days, the stem cells are collected and then usually they are shipped directly to the transplant center. And the timing is that they’re given to the patient at the time of the transplant. Now prior to the transplant, the patient undergoes what we call the preconditioning or the high dose chemotherapy. And that’s usually a protocol either involving doses of chemotherapy, which could be 20 to 200 times standard dose, or a period of four to five days. That’s called the conditioning. And patients who are undergoing both autologous and allogeneic undergo the same type of conditioning chemotherapy. And then after they’ve received that, usually over four to five days, the stem cells are then re -infused 48 hours later or within 48 hours.

Dr Maharaj
And then the patient undergoes care in supportive care, usually in the hospital. But later on we’ll talk more about how I developed it to be in the outpatient. But usually the standard of care is that the patient undergoes this procedure in the hospital. And then over a period of a month, sometimes shorter, and the blood counts recover, the white cell comes up, the hemoglobin comes up, the platelet count comes up, usually. And during that time, the patient is being monitored very carefully and treated for any damage to major organs like the liver, kidneys, lungs, et cetera. And so that essentially is the process and the procedure.

Robin Daly
that also during that period of the month they’re usually in isolation aren’t they? The risk of infection is so high.

Dr Maharaj
That is correct, yes.

Robin Daly
Yeah, which is psychologically quite a challenge, especially for children or, you know, it can be difficult. Yeah. Okay. Well, that’s good. Let’s give them the picture. And of course, on top of all that, it has its successes, but at the other end, you might get another cancer if you survive long enough as a side effect. So lots of pluses and minuses. So you’ve identified these two routes, if you like, through which it’s acting. One is the one that everybody thought it was going to do in the first place, which is the sledgehammer, which is simply killing cancer cells. The other one is this sort of kick in the pants to our own immune system to wake it up to do the job itself. Now, is there any kind of knowledge of what the relative input of these two different methods is? Well, is it like 50 -50 or is it much more one than the other or don’t we know?

Dr Maharaj
Well, I think that if you look at the frequency of the transplants being done, you’ll find that there are more transplants being done using an individual’s own stem cells. And the reason for that is because of the issue related to finding donors for the allogeneic transplant. Right. And there’s certain types of transplants where the doctors prefer to do an allogeneic transplant rather than the autologous transplant. But I believe that if the patient’s stem cells in the case of an autologous transplant are self -functioning and they’ve got enough stem cells, then the recovery of their immune system, which is really what does the work, is going to be better.

Dr Maharaj
And so often what tends to happen is you have patients who have treated multiple times using standard dosages of chemotherapy. And then as a last resort, they’re often sent for a transplant. And in that case, the outcomes tend to be not as good as if they identify early a patient who is not going to respond well to the standard dosages of chemotherapy and they’re selected early before they have these multiple cycles of chemotherapy, which decreases the numbers of their own functioning stem cells. So, two types of stem cells, you’ve got the cancer stem cells, you’ve got the normal functioning stem cells. The goal is rid of the cancer stem cells and let the normal stem cells do their work to be able to restore the immune system and the blood and then get rid of the cancer stem cells who prevent them from dividing and coming back. Interesting.

Robin Daly
Yes, so what you’re saying is that the kind of key to this is the patient’s own stem cells, their own immune. If they’re in good nick or still in good numbers then their chances of survival are much much better than if they’ve had them reduced by long chemotherapy, for example. Yes. Okay, well that’s very interesting. So you’ve latched onto this particular aspect of it, the fact that the patient’s own immune system is a significant contributor to their recovery or otherwise. And so you’ve developed a treatment protocol which is built around that concept. So do you want to describe what you’re doing?

Dr Maharaj
Yes. So my experiences came about because as I began to observe patients who you would think were good candidates in all respects, and after going through the procedure with them, then the disease was coming back. It’s natural that you begin to question what do you think, and you explain to the patient that you believe that as a doctor, you would say, I believe you’re going to do well. And in fact, when that didn’t happen, you would question everything that you’re doing. Why are you doing it? What is it for? Why do you put the patient through such a toxic procedure? And I say it’s a toxic procedure because there are so many side effects associated with it. And the second part was when I began to question what we were doing with the chemotherapy was when I started seeing patients coming back with secondary cancers.

Dr Maharaj
So at this point I said, well, we’ve got problems here. We’ve got problems to solve. And unless we go after it and try and understand better what’s going on, then we will keep doing the same thing over and over. And as in one of our discussions before, I think it’s a understanding if you keep doing the same thing over and over and hoping for a different outcome.

Robin Daly
Right. Yeah, no, we had a little chat to me. I quoted a Lord Sarge’s quote, which he made in this country, following the death of his wife from advanced ovarian cancer, where he said that the NHS was endlessly repeating a failed experiment, which is a very good way of summing up what the standard of care looked like, the gold standard, the best care they can offer doesn’t work. So why can’t doing it?

Dr Maharaj
So again, continuing to answer your question, we began to look to see other work that was being in the field of immunotherapy and also in bone marrow transplantation, because once we started to measure the immune systems of patients before and after, you could see that clearly the patients who were surviving after a bone marrow transplant and after immunotherapy were the patients whose cells of the immune systems like their B cells, T cells, and natural killer cells, and particularly the natural killer cells were being able to predict which patients would survive and do well after a transplant. So I came up with the approach that, okay, if we take a patient who is basically not a candidate for a transplant and we identify that the cancer is there and and also they may not be a candidate for chemotherapy, but that patient wants to have everything done for them where other doctors have said there’s nothing can be done.

Dr Maharaj
We measure their immune system and now we come up with a way to be able to stimulate their immune system without having to give them chemotherapy, but using cytokines which normally stimulates the immune system. And so this was the approach that I actually used for a patient who came to see me while I was doing transplants and he was a patient with a non -Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He was over 65, he was closer to 70, so he would have been rejected for a transplant. He had also seen five oncologists who basically accepted the amount of disease that he had of his lymphoma. It was so extensive that there was no way that they were going to give him any chemotherapy. So he came to me and initially I said, no, I’m sorry I can’t help you, but he was persistent. He and his wife kept coming back, what can you not do something for us? And I said, well, why don’t we work on your immune system?

Dr Maharaj
First of all, let me measure your immune system and let me measure particularly your natural killer cells and your B cells and T cells. But I was also able to measure his natural killer cell function. His natural killer cell function was 0%, which is what we would expect. I’m not saying 0% in every patient with cancer, but certainly his natural killer cells being 0%, and his B cells and T cells being very low. He has no defenses to be able to grow that cancer. And in fact, what’s happening-

Robin Daly
without treatment, already the cancer, and suppressed his immune system to that level.

Dr Maharaj
Yes, exactly. So I said to him that what we were going to do was using low dosages of the immunotherapy, which I’m not allowed to give the name of it because it’s basically when you’re treating patients with this way, where the dosages are different than the approved dosages, it’s called advertising, which we’re not allowed to do. So I’ll just explain the general concepts of what we did. So we basically took a medication which was being used to treat cancer as immunotherapy, but I tailored it to him based upon his immune system. And I provided supportive care where if he needed IV fluids or he needed antibiotics or he needed electrolytes and micronutrients, we’ve provided all of that supportive care to him. And then we started working on his immune system and we would treat him for periods of 16 days or a month.

Dr Maharaj
And then we’d measure his immune system after that. The idea I explained to him is that we would try and if we could see that his immune system was beginning to turn on again, it’s like turning the engine on, we would continue. If we didn’t see that it was working, we would have to basically come out of it because at that point the treatment was working. But fortunately, after the first two treatments, we saw that his natural killer cell function and his B cells and T cells were coming up and we also saw that his tumor, which we could measure because he had enlarged lymph nodes in his neck, he had enlarged lymph nodes in his abdomen, his groin, these were all massively sore and we could see them shrinking. And so he was very encouraged and he was feeling much better because by providing the supportive care, he was feeling better.

Dr Maharaj
So we continued on that path and nine months later, he was in complete remission. He was in complete remission where not only the scans that we used to be able to look at the cancer, but we were also able to find that the tumor antigens that we can measure at the molecular level were no longer present. We were then able to say that he was in what we call a much deeper level of remission, which is called a molecular remission.

Robin Daly
Mm -hmm interesting. All right. I’ve not heard that term, but that’s obviously yeah, that’s much more like a cure than a remission is is what you’ll say Yes

Dr Maharaj
And I say that is because when we treat cancer, we treat cancer as a whole, but cancer is not really the same, just like every patient’s different, cancer is different. Within a cancer, there are many different types of cells. There are cancer stem cells, there are cancer stem cells, there are also cells of the immune system trying to kill the cancer, and there are cancer cells, which are differentiated cancer cells. Chemotherapy destroys the differentiated cancer cells, but the cancer cells within that tumor, which are cancer stem cells, and which are evading the chemotherapy and which often leave the cancer and circulate in the blood, those are not destroyed by chemotherapy or radiation or standard treatments, and those are the things we have to go after. So, when we can find a marker for those cells, we show that those cells are not no longer there. That’s when we can talk about a molecular.

Robin Daly
Interesting, interesting. Yeah, well, I think a lot of listeners have heard about cancer stem cells, but obviously, they’re kind of breathe their parts in cancer cells. As you say, you can relatively easily kill off the regular rank and file of cancer cells. But these stem cells have an ability to survive under very bad conditions, and they will regenerate cancer themselves. They can do all the work of getting the whole process underway by themselves come back.

Dr Maharaj
Yes, that’s correct, and that’s basically how cancer arises. Cancer cells or stem cells arise in individuals all the time because exposure to toxins and environmental factors which basically produce toxins will cause a normal stem cell to undergo DNA damage, which that DNA damage then goes on to become a cancer stem cell. That cancer stem cell could be sitting sleeping within the body. When it turns on, the immune system and particularly natural killer cells will kill it and should prevent it from actually becoming the cancer. If we talk about a molecular emission, we’re going back to that level to be able to identify at that level whether the cancer stem cell is dividing or not. Now we have technology using next -generation sequencing and liquid biopsies to be able to identify those cells when they’re dividing.

Dr Maharaj
We measure that as well. We talked initially about measuring the immune system precisely for each patient, but we also measure in the blood circulating tumor cells and the DNA from those circulating tumor cells. We do next -generation sequencing of those circulating DNA. Amongst the circulating tumor cells are cancer stem cells because the cancer stem cell has the ability to stay within the tumor, but it also is what causes metastases because it moves from the original tumor to another site. Often the data shows that often it can sit. Even when someone has developed cancer early, it can sit in another site, an enormous tissue, and sends signals back driving the original cancer from which it came.

Robin Daly
Fascinating, personally. So your approach then, rather than using the sledgehammer of high dose chemotherapy, is kind of encouraging, if you like, the immune system to get going rather than kicking it. And so supporting the immune system and as I say, encouraging it to restart. It’s interesting really, because, you know, if you look at the long history of immunotherapy, that’s largely what the thread of immunotherapy was until recently. Immunotherapy has gone from being a kind of outlier, if you like, most of the time, in terms of an approach. But now it’s the baby of the pharmaceutical companies, and they’re trying to achieve immunotherapy with drugs, which it seems to me it’s like, while they’re still using the sledgehammer, basically, they’re not trying to do it from a point of view, support and encouragement with the immune system, but again, kicking it in a different way. Is that a reasonable description?

Dr Maharaj
Yes. I would say I’d like to introduce two terms. One is a reductionist, and the second is a whole approach. A reductionist approach is basically, as you say, it’s basically like you take a drug and you say, this drug will kill a cancer cell because it works in this way. But we know that cancer cells are much smarter than the drug. Right. So the whole approach is basically saying, look, our immune systems are designed to deal with cancer and the smartness of cancer because it’s like our immune system when it’s working normally. It’s like an orchestra. You have so many players in the orchestra and you have the conductor of the orchestra and the conductor is directing everyone depending on where he sees, first of all, the symphony he wants to play. He wants the orchestra to play. Well, that’s like the immune system. So if you say, well, it’s just one component of the orchestra that plays fine, yes, you can get a very finely tuned section playing very good music.

Dr Maharaj
But if that section goes down, the rest of the orchestra doesn’t play. So I hope I’m giving the analogy which I think about the immune system and how what we’re doing to be able to kill cancer cells.

Robin Daly
Well, I mean, you know, the thing that always strikes me about the immune system is, well, yeah, as you say, it’s unbelievably sophisticated, and it’s built to do this job. And I think the key thing about it as compared with any kind of treatment is that it’s constantly adapting itself to the challenge, whereas treatment is just a treatment. And if it doesn’t work anymore, it’s because it hasn’t adapted, but cancer has. And so, yeah, that hence, it’s always seemed to be a very intelligent approach to treating cancer is to actually employ the best system we’ve got yet to do it. We’ve not got a lot of time left, but I wanted to just home in on a point which you mentioned to me when we talked before, which is that rather than seeing your approach as a sort of single treatment on its own, you kind of look at it as part of an integrative approach where you provide a lot of other supportive treatment alongside it.

Robin Daly
And I think you would say that was key to its success as well. So do you want to just describe that a bit?

Dr Maharaj
Yes, absolutely. So again, just to repeat what you’re saying, my approach is basically looking at restoring the immune system and measuring it. And it’s not just one aspect of the immune system, it’s the complete aspect of the immune system when we describe that as both the innate and the adaptive immune system. So we measure both components and we restore that. But then we have to think about lifestyle, lifestyle medicine, lifestyle and environmental factors which causes the immune system to go down in the first place. So the additional approach which I take is we have a pretty good idea of what are the things that causes the immune system to become defective in the first place. And so using, again, a precision approach, we measure for each individual patient what their gut microbiome is, what foods that they’re eating that are causing inflammation, because inflammation drives cancer.

Dr Maharaj
We look to see their micronutrients because they’re macronutrients, micronutrients, but we don’t just throw everything at them. We measure to see what precisely they’re deficient in and we give them those. Then we also look to see what toxins they’ve got in their system. We also look to see as far as their diets, what particular type of diet they’re actually taking. Some people may say, well, it’s one type of diet. Well, on the whole, a whole food plant -based diet is very good because it helps to feed the microbiome and the microbiome of the gut is actually one of the key components to maintaining a healthy immune system. So we also have to take into account other factors like sleep, stress, exercise. These are all factors that are important for maintaining a healthy immune system. So those are some of the aspects of what I regard as taking into account the individual’s lifestyle and environment and identifying specifically the areas that are abnormal and fixing that.

Dr Maharaj
Because when we correct the immune system using immunotherapy approach, unless we address all of these other issues, then the immune system will go back down. So this is the recognition and the maintenance plan for the patients.

Robin Daly
Well, I think what you’re saying is probably music the ears of a lot of our listeners. A lot of them are well aware of how important all those factors are and the fact that you’re taking them into account in order to achieve success with your treatment is very heartening to hear. All too often they’re completely ignored. So that’s great. So would it be fair to sum up your treatment as being largely very safe and largely non -toxic?

Dr Maharaj
Yes. When I set out to change our treatment protocols from bone marrow transplantation to our personalized precision immunotherapy approach, I had three objectives. Number one is safe, that is to have patients be able to get their treatments with very low side effects. In fact, I like to use the word minimal side effects. The second thing is that we had to keep them out of the hospital and it would be outpatient. And the third one was by measuring the outcomes before and after and keeping our focus on getting the results that we wanted, we would be able to achieve those three successes. And as I said, the measurements we do are the immune system, but we also measure using biopsies and particularly the liquid biopsies where we can look at the cancer stem cells and circulating tumor cells, which we use a very precise approach to be able to do that. So that’s essentially what our goals are.

Robin Daly
And can you give any indication as to the amount of success you’re achieving with patients?

Dr Maharaj
Yes. Essentially, when we accept patients for our program and we set them on this path, the successes we’re seeing is that really in over 80 percent of our patients, we’re achieving that success. What are the factors that don’t allow patients to be able to achieve that? Well, number one, I’m persistent because like the first patient I described, he was persistent. I’m persistent, and so we achieved the success. The earlier we get our patients, the better, because like in his case, he never experienced chemotherapy, so his immune system was not really damaged by any prior treatments. So, we are continuously looking to see how we could improve that. Cost is a factor because the treatments we provide are not covered by insurance and they can be expensive. So, that’s something that patients have to take into account if they would like to be evaluated for our treatment.

Dr Maharaj
So, these are some of the obstacles that we see. Number one, patients being able to stay the course. Two, patients have competing treatments that they’re doing, which are interfering with what we’re doing. And then, of course, the other factors, we are in Florida. So, patients have to come to us distances. But I would say our program is an international program because we have patients from all over the world coming to us for our treatments. And that is because they’ve heard about the successes of it. And many times, as patients who have achieved the successes, who tell other patients about what we’re doing, and that’s often how the news is spread about our program.

Robin Daly
Well, well, look, I feel we’ve sort of skimmed the surface. I was quite top level in a way. There’s so much detail we could go into there, but it’s been incredibly interesting, key to us to you for pushing things forward, developing new ways of looking at what your particular skill can look like, you know, bone marrow transplant and all that. You’ve come from that background. You’ve seen what’s working, what isn’t working and evaluated it and developed something new. We really need that. So, very interesting talk. Thank you so much for coming on the show. And it’s just great to find out about your innovative work and its potential to help us to combat cancer. Thank you very much, Dr. Maharaj.

Dr Maharaj
Again, Robin, thank you for having me, and I hope that for the listeners that one of the things that we’ve been able to share with them is the fact that with cancer, cancer is very beatable, and we give them hope, and being on the right path is the way to success. Absolutely.

Robin Daly
Thank you very much.

An important point that didn’t get highlighted in that interview is that Dr. Maharaj’s treatment approach is applicable to cancer, full stop. By which I mean, it’s a potential approach to any type of cancer, as a well -functioning immune system is potentially a match for any cancer. And even for those for whom treatment in Florida isn’t an option, the thinking behind Dr. Maharaj’s approach is something that could equally be applied in other ways. So I hope you found it useful in opening up new ideas or indeed bolstering your current thinking. Thanks for listening today. I shall be back next week with another expert guest as usual. So I hope you’ll make a point to joining me again for another Yes To Life show here on UK Health Radio. Goodbye.