(CBS)
This segment was originally broadcast on April 13, 2008. It was updated
on July 16, 2008.
What if we told you that a guy with no background in science or medicine -
not even a college degree - has come up with what may be one of the most
promising breakthroughs in cancer research in years?
Well it's true, and if you think it sounds improbable, consider this: he
did it with his wife's pie pans and hot dogs.
His name is John Kanzius, and as correspondent Lesley Stahl first
reported last April, he's a former businessman and radio technician who
built a radio wave machine that has cancer researchers so enthusiastic
about its potential they're pouring money and effort into testing it out.
Here's the important part: if clinical trials pan out - and there's still
a long way to go - the Kanzius machine will zap cancer cells all through
your body without the need for drugs or surgery and without side effects.
None at all. At least that's the idea.
The last thing John Kanzius thought he'd ever do was try to cure cancer. A
former radio and television executive from Pennsylvania, he came to
Florida to enjoy his retirement.
"I have no business being in the cancer business. It’s not something that
a layman like me should be in, it should be left to doctors and research
people," he told Stahl.
"But sometimes it takes an outsider," Stahl remarked.
"Sometimes it just - maybe you get lucky," Kanzius replied.
It was the worst kind of luck that gave Kanzius the idea to use radio
waves to kill cancer cells: six years ago, he was diagnosed with terminal
leukemia and since then has undergone 36 rounds of toxic chemotherapy. But
it wasn't his own condition that motivated him, it was looking into the
hollow eyes of sick children on the cancer ward at M.D. Anderson Cancer
Center in Houston.
"I saw the smiles of youth and saw their spirits were broken. And you
could see that they were sort of asking, 'Why can't they do something for
me?'" Kanzius told Stahl.
"So they started to haunt you. The children," Stahl asked.
"Their faces. I still remember them holding on their Teddy bears and so
forth," he replied. "And shortly after that I started my own chemotherapy,
my third round of chemotherapy."
Kanzius told Stahl the chemotherapy made him
very sick and that he couldn't sleep at night. "And I said, 'There’s gotta
be a better way to treat cancer.'"
It was during one of those sleepless nights that the light bulb went off.
When he was young, Kanzius was one of those kids who built radios from
scratch, so he knew the hidden power of radio waves. Sick from chemo, he
got out of bed, went to the kitchen, and started to build a radio wave
machine.
"Started looking in the cupboard and I saw pie pans and I said, 'These are
perfect. I can modify these,'" he recalled.
His wife Marianne woke up that night to a lot of banging and clamoring. "I
was concerned truthfully that he had lost it," she told Stahl.
"She felt sorry for me," Kanzius added.
"I did," Marianne Kanzius acknowledged. "And I had mentioned to him,
'Honey, the doctors can't-you know, find an answer to cancer. How can you
think that you can?'"
That's what 60 Minutes wanted to know, so Stahl went to his
garage laboratory to find out.
Here's how it works: one box sends radio waves over to the other, creating
enough energy to activate gas in a fluorescent light. Kanzius put his hand
in the field to demonstrate that radio waves are harmless to humans.
"So right from the beginning you're trying to show that radio waves could
activate gas and not harm the human-anything else," Stahl remarked.
"'Cause you're looking for some kind of a treatment with no side effects,
that's what's in your head."
"No side effects," Kanzius replied.
(CBS)
But how could he focus the radio waves to destroy cancer cells?
"That was the next $64,000 question," Kanzius said.
The answer would cost much more than that. Kanzius spent about $200,000
just to have a more advanced version of his machine built. He knew that
metal heats up when it's exposed to high-powered radio waves. So what if a
tumor was injected with some kind of metal, and zapped with a focused beam
of radio waves? Would the metal heat up and kill the cancer cells, but
leave the area around them unharmed?
He did his first test with hot dogs.
"I'm going to inject it with some copper sulfate," Kanzius explained,
demonstrating the machine. "And I’m going to take the probe right at the
injection site."
Kanzius placed the hot dog in his radio wave machine, and Stahl watched to
see if the temperature would rise in that one area where the metal
solution was and nowhere else.
"And when I saw it start to go up I said, 'Eureka, I've done it,'" Kanzius
remembered. "And I said, 'God, I gotta shut this off and see whether it's
still cold down below.' So I shut it off, took my probe, went down here
where it wasn’t injected. And the temperature dropped back down. And I
said, 'God, maybe I got something here.'"
Kanzius thought he had found a way attack cancer cells without the
collateral damage caused by chemotherapy and radiation. Today, his
invention is in the laboratories of two major research centers - the
University of Pittsburgh and M.D. Anderson, where Dr. Steven Curley, a
liver cancer surgeon, is testing it.
"This technology may allow us to treat just about any kind of cancer you
can imagine," Dr. Curley told Stahl. "I've gotta tell you, in 20 years of
research this is the most exciting thing that I’ve encountered."
That's because Kanzius impressed Curley with another remarkable idea: to
combine the radio waves from his device with something cutting edge -
space age nanoparticles made of metal or carbon. They are so small that
thousands of them can fit in a single cancer cell. Because they’re
metallic, Kanzius was hoping his radio waves would heat them up and kill
the cancer.
"If these nanoparticles work then we truly have something huge here,"
Kanzius told Stahl.
Enter Rick Smalley, another cancer patient at M.D. Anderson and the man
who won the Nobel Prize for discovering nanoparticles made from carbon. As
luck would have it, Dr. Curley was called in one day to examine Smalley.
Before leaving, he asked him for some of his nanoparticles.
"I proceeded to tell him what I wanted to do and that I thought they would
heat. He looked at me with sort of a studied long look and didn’t say
anything. And then he looked at me and said, 'It won’t work,'" Curley
remembered. "And just laughed and said, 'Well, look, I'll give you some.
But don't be too disappointed.'"
So Dr. Curley brought a vial of those precious nanoparticles to John
Kanzius.
(CBS)
And on an August day in 2005, Curley and Kanzius put them to the test.
Would the metallic nanoparticles heat up enough to kill cancer?
"So we take the nanoparticles, we put 'em in the radio field. And in about
15 seconds, they’re boiling and heating and Steve Curley couldn't contain
himself. He called Rick Smalley and he said, 'Rick, you’re not going to
believe this. He just blew the smithereens out of your nanoparticles,'"
Kanzius recalled.
Smalley's response? "The only thing that I got out of him after this pause
was, “Holy s…,'" Curley recalled.
Not long after that day, Smalley died of lymphoma. Once a skeptic, he had
become one of Kanzius' biggest supporters.
"He didn’t expect it, but he embraced it to his death bed when he told Dr.
Curley this will change medicine forever. Don't stop, no matter what you
do," Kanzius told Stahl.
And they haven't stopped. They’ve already shown that the Kanzius machine
can heat nanoparticles and cook cancer to death in animals. Dr. Curley
with rabbits, and in Pittsburgh, Dr. David Geller demonstrated to 60
Minutes how he used nanoparticles, made from gold, to kill liver
cancer cells grown in rats.
"Now what we’re going to do is inject the nanoparticles," Dr. Geller
explained. "Directly into the tumor."
In the study the rats, anesthetized to keep them still, were exposed to
the Kanzius radio waves. Dr. Geller later examined their tumors under a
microscope.
"What you can see is that cells are starting to fall apart. You see white
spaces in between them. The body of the cell is shrinking, the cells are
starting to die," Geller pointed out.
"And can you tell from this whether the area surrounding the tumor had any
destruction?" Stahl asked.
"Grossly inspecting the animal, we did not see not see any damage to the
surrounding tissue," Geller said.
So far, the Kanzius method has only been applied to solid, localized
tumors in animals. The ultimate goal is to treat cancer that has
metastasized or spread to other parts of the body. Those undetectable
rogue cells are what most often kill people with cancer and the trick is
finding them.
"If we can't target the microscopic cells this is not going to be a cure,"
Curley said.
(CBS)
That’s why Curley is trying to use special molecules that are programmed
to target cancer cells and attach nanoparticles to them.
He showed Stahl an animation of how he hopes the targeting will work in
people one day, with a simple injection of gold nanoparticles into the
bloodstream.
"What we’re seeing here is an example of a gold nanoparticle in this case
with an antibody on it, so the antibody would be the targeting molecule,"
Curley explained. "You can see it is tiny compared to a normal red blood
cell just imagine all of these billions of these gold nanoparticles
circulating through the body and then once they get into the blood vessels
going to the tumor, these nanoparticles would go through and bind on the
surface of the cell."
"The cancer cell. It wouldn't bind on a normal cell," Stahl observed.
"That's right, they would bind only to the cancer cell. Now here’s the
nanoparticles in the cell, here comes John's radio frequency treatment.
The cells get hot and they’re destroyed," Curley said.
"Gosh, it does look like one of those science fiction movies," Stahl
remarked.
"Right now it is a little science fiction," Curley agreed. "We’re not
quite to the real time yet, but it’s got a lot of promise."
Even if all goes well in the lab, it'll be at least another four years
before human trials can start. But John Kanzius says he's afraid he
doesn't have that much time. So to help speed up the research, he's been
raising millions of dollars and getting press coverage about his
invention.
"Now I can't count the number of times the journalistic community, has
done stories on a cancer cure," Stahl said. "I did one in 1973. …How many
times have we seen these things work in the Petri dish, work with animals.
And then you get them into humans and they don’t work."
"Dozens," Curley replied.
But if this one does work, it most likely won't be developed in time to
help the man who invented it. John Kanzius may have the option of a bone
marrow transplant that could buy him more time, but after six years of
chemo it would be another grueling ordeal.
"Did you ever say, 'I’m not going to do this anymore. I’m not going to put
myself through it,'?" Stahl asked.
"Yes. I said that-only about a year and a half ago," Kanzius replied. "I
changed my mind because I think with all the research that’s going on with
the institutions, that maybe, I'd like to be around for the first patient
to get treated and just have a smile."
"Oh my God," Stahl said.
"And then I don't care anymore," Kanzius replied.
END OF TRANSCRIPT |
