More insights on preventing and treating disease at very low cost with oncologist and virologist, Professor Angus Dalgleish
Now, we want to start off with a m well I think I’m I’m torn I’ve got a two to two to two to two immediate new developments in medicine to talk about with you as as you are one of the leading medical researchers and certainly one of the most experienced medical researchers in the country. Now, we actually came on to talk about the uh the the new uh bacterial stimulation of the immune system that you’ve developed. But ju just chatting before we came on, we talked about about the importance of vitamin D, which ties in with the talks on David Grimes yesterday. Ju just briefly, how important is it to be vitamin D replete when treating cancers? Well, it it is so important that it it is pointless, I believe, treating cancer patients until you’ve got their vitamin D level high or supplement it with D3 or calciferile uh is so important and the literature is replete out there. I mean the uh since we first uh spotted it with regards imunotherapy, why do some people fail and other people respond and we spent two years or so spent lots of uh money on looking at everything going and then the vitamin D test becomes available to us and it’s immediately obvious if you got low vitamin D it’s waste of time giving them imunotherapy. So, so if it’s sophisticated immunotherapy treatments, some people respond, some people don’t respond and you find out it’s the nonresponders have got low levels of vitamin D and the responders have got adequate levels of vitamin D. Can it be that simple? It is that simple and it revolutionized our treatment because we measured everybody’s vitamin D before going on any treatment. We got it to a decent level and that’s why our randomized study using uh IMM 101 which is the Ekill bacteria we’re talking about. That’s why that trial showed a benefit because we had corrected vitamin D deficiency. Now there’s so many papers out there now. I mean there’s one metaanalysis paper of 88,000 patients looking at patients in trials with all sorts of treatment all sorts of cancers where they had measured the vitamin D before starting and they had some centers which corrected it and others that just left it measured and the ones that corrected it had a 13% improvement in clinical outcome whether it be chemotherapy radiotherapy, mixtures of surgery, whatever it was. And to show you how important this is, that temoxifen was the uh the ER blocker for breast cancer, the world’s first big uh blockbuster pharmaceutical, had an 8% improvement. So that that really puts it into context how important this is. And you know, I mentioned that I’m just horrified. I get uh calls for people for second opinion why they haven’t responded uh and they’ve had very very good treatment and I’m just horrified that they go to top cancer centers and they’ve never bothered to measure the vitamin D in spite of all these papers. And I had a guy the other day I couldn’t I measured his vitamin D and it basically they couldn’t measure it. It was so low. So all we have to do to improve his outcome is to greatly improve that vitamin D. And I I do f and this is a problem of big farmer driving uh driving the the process the protocols. They’re not interested in vitamin D. So it’s not even mentioned a lot of these protocols. And it it is I I believe it’s negligent. I think the data is so strong it’s negligent not to measure vitamin D before you start treating a cancer patient. I mean we’ve got all the Bradford Hill criteria really. We’ve got we’ve got the epidemiological correlates. We’ve got the associations. We’ve we’ve got the before and after. Mhm. Uh we’ve got the temporal correlation. We’ve got plausible mechanisms the the immuno modulatory amunoimizing effects of vitamin D. It all makes perfect sense. I mean, poor Bradford Hill. I mean, I mean, you know, Austin might be turning in his grave at this because, you know, why why bother doing all this work when it’s ignored? It’s just Exactly. I mean it’s such a waste of really expensive drugs and uh you know one of the things when we when we presented the pancreatic data with IMM 101 and at ASCO and uh we were the only people to have a survival benefit with a so-called imunotherapy and the big classic ones that work for melanoma didn’t work and one of the guys and I presented it said you know why is yours the only one works and all the others don’t work. You know, like he just didn’t believe us. And I said, “Well, you’ll find that probably we’re the only trial that’s ever looked at vitamin D levels before we you we randomize you on the trial and make sure that it’s corrected. It’s that simple.” Well, this guy had done thousands of patients from clinical trials for pancreatic cancer, and he said, “I’ve never heard of this.” He calls me up 3 months later. He said, “I set it as a project to somebody cuz all our samples for years are stored.” And he said, “I cannot believe it.” He said, “The only people that respond to chemotherapy are the only people that have normal vitamin D.” He said, “It is black and white.” And he said, “We certainly will be changing our practice after that.” It’s it’s s it’s the medical establish establishment just seems obtuse. M they’re just determined to be unteachable for for bizarre reasons. I I I’m I’m guessing you want something like 40 mg per mill which is 100 nanom moles per liter. G does that sound about Yeah, absolutely. I I think that’s the crucial level. The uh the NHS sets it at 50 and say anything over 50 is fine. No, it’s not because it’s taken from the normal range of the population and the normal population is chronically deficient in vitamin D. So with all my years of experience looking at when people benefit, it’s over 100 100 nanom moles and it’s not high dose. It’s not because normal is up to 200. Y it just shows that the majority of people are sitting 30 40 and some of them I’ve had as low as seven or 19. I mean, it’s unbelievable. And they look fine, but they don’t respond. It’s that simple. And you know, people still say to me, why are you going on about this? Everybody knows it’s only important in ricketetts. It is important in ricketetts, but that was the insight. It’s important in everything. Yeah. Just showed up first. I mean, and are you slightly a different question, but are you fairly convinced in your own mind that maintaining good levels of vitamin D is going to reduce the probability of developing certain types of cancer? Well, at the time I really looked about the the data that proved that supplementing to the normal level when the diagnosis was made was just completely 100% correlation definitely. They did said they struggled to find whether uh supplementing vitamin D prevented the cancer. So but that may be part of the difficulty the methodology in which they were looking at. I I greatly believe that uh because the vitamin D is so important to your immune function and particularly your innate immune function that it makes perfect sense to supplement absolutely everybody over a uh a certain age. Well, 50 is the age when your cancer rate starts to go up. So having everybody at a good vitamin D level then then of course as a side effect you just buff off flu COVID all these things and I looked at data suggesting you got a good vitamin D level it’s far more effective to prevent you from flu than flu vaccines. Yeah, I mean there are four papers saying that. So I’m not committing any heresy or it’s out there and uh I mean that’s if I was uh CMO that’s what I’d be pushing for not for all these vaccine programs. And is there is there any downside to maintaining a vitamin D level of 100 nanomles per liter? Will I get any horrible side effects if I do that? absolutely none unless you go into renal failure and uh if you’re in renal failure the vitamin D can build up and and enhance it or if you have certain rare phosphate uh problems pathways but apart from that I mean I have seen people who go over the top and they take tens of thousands and their vitamin D is well over 200 uh they don’t seem to go into trouble but you don’t want that because it is excreted up by the kidneys and it could cause um kidney stones and renal failure. Indeed. Yeah. But I mean limiting the dose of drug that’s universally true for every single drug, isn’t it? In renal failure. Absolutely. Yeah. You know, you know, you give maybe a tenth of the dose of an antibiotic or give the doses 10 times less frequently because you’re not excreting. You haven’t got the renal excretion. So that is totally fascinating and bewildering in equal measures. I think the thing about the great thing about vitamin D is the assay is so easy. It’s so straightforward. You’re not guessing. You’re not throwing things into the wind. You’re giving a level. You’re seeing it in the normal range and you suggest this should keep you there and you can two months later you can check it out. And it’s a very simple titration to do just I mean if every everything was this simple it would be wonderful but it is that simple. Well, that’s why we need professors to to do the clever, the more sophisticated
