Mike: Hi from the heart of New York City. It’s the Morning Show with Mike and Juliet, Tuesday.
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Announcer: Still to come he fought cancer – the only one who knew how with the tools in his garage. Can this radio buff’s home made labor of love, mean the cure for the deadly disease?
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Mike: Boy, we have important information now after millions of dollars in research science still cannot find an alternative to the painful process of chemotherapy.
Juliet: Well, wait a second, that is until the patient you are about to meet began tinkering with his tool set – tool set - his kitchen, spoons…
Mike: In the garage.
Juliet: What he came up with may forever change the way we treat cancer. Watch this!
Mike: Five years ago John Kanzius was diagnosed with leukemia. The retired radio station owner was told he had less than a year to live. However, John became concerned not about himself but rather about the children he saw ravaged by chemotherapy.
John Kanzius: It’s what drove me to spend my personal money and my personal time to try to find a way – an easier way to treat this dreaded disease.
Mike: John wanted to find an alternative to treat cancer and to do it he headed to his kitchen.
John Kanzius: Not have anything in my house I went down to my wife’s drawer which had some nice pie-pans and I got an industrial pair of scissors and I started cutting those up in the different forms.
Mike: He wasn’t a doctor and he didn’t even have a college degree but John knew radios from spanning his career in the business using pie-pans and spare radio parts in his garage he created the first generation of a machine that uses radio waves to fight cancer. John got the attention of cancer researchers who although initially skeptical, became convinced it had the potential to be a big breakthrough. It seems they are right. They spent the last two years testing the technology and in one study with cancerous rabbits the machine completely destroyed all the animals’ tumors. Now John is looking forward to making it available to humans.
John Kanzius: I want to get it on the market as quickly as possible so the people who are diagnosed today with perhaps an incurable cancer could have some kind of treatment within a couple of years.
Mike: Well joining us from his home in Sanibel, Florida – John Kanzius is with us.
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Juliet: Also joining us in studios, Dr. Paul Cherukuri, he is the assistant professor at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas and Paul, we are going to get to you in a second but John, I don’t know what to say about this, I mean, first of all I think it’s important to point out you don’t have any kind of medical degree, do you?
John Kanzius: No I don’t, Juliet. I guess I am a quick study.
Mike: John, you look pretty darn good for a guy that wasn’t going to last more than nine months back in 2002.
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John Kanzius: Well, thank you.
Mike: So I know it’s going to be hard for us to understand this. Using your expertise, you call it or but tell us exactly who do you get down to these little metal particles that you are injecting into your veins?
John Kanzius: Well, my original thought after seeing so much suffering at the cancer centers and seeing young children that I knew would never grow up and have a life, it literally broke my heart and I thought there must be a better way to treat cancer. I know the drug companies have all their targeting molecules and so forth and they keep saying they are coming up with better treatments but from my observations the treatments are short and tough on people and the remissions are real long so I just thought we need a better way and I have been a radio person, I thought why not send a signal to a cancer cell and give it a fever and kill it?
Juliet: And you went into your kitchen and you started boiling up a brew and it actually is, it is effective on rabbits.
John Kanzius: Yes, I went to my kitchen and I built some stuff and that took a while. My first specimen was hot dogs and that worked very well and the rest of it is sort of history, some of the largest institutions in the world have picked up on it and we have had success with eradicating 100% of tumors that were growing in rabbits…
Mike: That’s amazing.
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Try to help us understand what it is – why did you start with a hot dog? What were you doing with that hot dog, you injecting that with what?
John Kanzius: Well I was injecting it with copper sulfate at the time because it was the easiest thing that I could find and copper sulfate was very conductive. So I would set a wiener up in my electronic field that I had created and injected with some copper sulfate and within 30 seconds or so that particular area was getting warm and eventually getting hot and I said Eureka, maybe I’ve got something that would work.
Mike: Eureka indeed, so Paul, I mean these little metal particles are being injected into his bloodstream?
Dr. Paul Cherukuri: Yeah, the way we envision this is very simple – we want to inject directly into a person just a simple shot and then using John’s system that he invented, which is a beautiful system, to be able to heat up cancer cells because these particles will attach to tumors and then you just focus the radio waves and you heat up just the tumors and what’s wonderful is this is non-ionizing radiation, what that mean is that we are not going to damage normal tissue. With most chemotherapy you are actually killing the patient as much as you are killing the tumor and then you hope that the patient will come back. What we are doing is just hitting the tumor.
Juliet: What do you have for the medical community about this, and you are part of the community but I mean there have got to be that lot of people were going ‘pots and pans’?
Dr. Paul Cherukuri: Most great scientific kind of leaps forward start with something very basic, very simple. What John was able to do was come up with a great little idea because he was upset that he had cancer and then on top of that you see the suffering around the world with cancer and so what he said was he is not taking it anymore; he built this thing and then he worked with us
Mike: But you know, people have been diagnosed with a leukemia or any kind of cancer watching the show today, go ‘oh my God, I want to do this’, how do we get it from hot dogs to rabbits to humans, as fast as humanly possible, how long is this going to take?
Dr. Paul Cherukuri: I know. Well, we think that we can do this in about four to five years. What we really need is to get enough support and funding out there. Right now this is such a new idea there’s not a lot of funding for it. We are hoping to rattle the cages and get people to start supporting this and I think we can get the…
Mike: Well, none of us are doctors are here on this set so we asked Dr. Kurt Hesse, a radiation oncologist with Cancer Treatment Centers of America in Philadelphia and he gave us the following statement about John’s invention.
Juliet: “Cancer Treatment Centers of America is eager to adopt the most advanced medical treatments and therapies to help patients and to extend hope in their fight against cancer. However, we encourage additional research to prove the safety efficacy of this treatment.” That’s not a negative, that’s not a negative comment, I mean obviously that’s what you are saying, four or five, you know, ten years, whatever it takes.
Dr. Paul Cherukuri: We need to do the research because we want to be able to help people as quickly as possible. We need to do it safe and effective manner. We can do that in four to five years if we get enough support; enough people in the lab doing it.
Mike: Wow, John, congratulations! John Kanzius, a guy who works in our business, radio and television. What a hero!
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Juliet: John, we are going to stay in touch with you. We want to follow up to find out what’s happening with it as the years go by. Thank you so much. If you want to make from John’s home made cancer invention log on to our website dayshow.com.