It seemed too good to be true: Where others have had disappointing results only, Werner Bezwoda found that patients with cancer of the breast, bombarded with drugs, and then given a bone marrow transplant, lived longer than standard chemotherapy in patients. Now, researchers say that promising results were indeed too good to be true. At a disciplinary hearing on March 10, officials from the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, found that Bezwoda distorted its findings and failed to get approval for the trial before proceeding with it. The university fired him.
hopes Before his fall, Bezwoda was raised in the cancer community. At the American Society Annual Meeting of Clinical Oncology in Atlanta last May, he described a trial of 154 breast cancer patients with advanced tumors were removed, but remained at a high risk of metastases. According to his presentation, Bezwoda has given each of the 75 patients two treatments with a cocktail of high doses of drugs that kill all cells that divide and transplant patient's own bone marrow cells after each cycle of chemotherapy to restore their immune system. Compared with patients in the control group 79 given standard treatment of low-dose drug, Bezwoda reported, the high dose group survived about twice as long without relapse, on average. Similar blitzkriegs worked against testicular cancer and some leukemias, so that "many people were very enthusiastic and thought we should go forward" with a major test based Bezwoda protocol, said the oncologist Marc Lippman Lombardi cancer Center of Georgetown University in Washington, DC
However, based on the report of an independent audit team of the United States released last week by the Lancet , Witwatersrand launched an investigation. It only moves 58 patients records with high-dose chemotherapy, 17 fewer than in Atlanta Bezwoda claimed to have treated. for Bezwoda own protocol, the US team found the majority patients should never have been included: their medical records indicated that their cancers were not sufficiently advanced to warrant aggressive treatment, or that patients had undergone radiotherapy, an exclusion criterion.
Bezwoda could not be reached for comment, but in a Statement 11 March it maintains its conclusions are valid. He claims his false statement in the control group "does not invalidate my basic conclusions" on the high-dose chemotherapy and survival of patients. But not how Peter Cleaton-Jones, Chairman of the Witwatersrand Committee for research on human subjects, sees it. "The [Bezwoda's] sends behavior," he says, "is" Medical researchers should not be trusted. ""
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