It appears AstraZeneca was trying a new way to treat autoimmune diseases like my MS, and the way they chose was to extract allllll the immune cells from a person’s body, find the ones that were defective, cull them, and then pump the good ones back in.
A really effective way to accidentally kill someone in a clinical trial is to set off a cytokine storm, in which the body gets a rush of too many immune cells all at once. Immune cells go out rampaging, glorying in their numbers, driven mad with power, and they charge around destroying healthy organs in their path and the person dies.
So that looks like there’s another clinical trial to add to my list of clinical trials gone wrong.
Three people died in this latest AstraZeneca Trial. That trial is cancelled. Oddly, that same technique is also being used on cancer patients, and the cancer patient’s trial is not cancelled. I would hate to think the cancer patients were continuing with the risky treatments because they were closer to death, but I suspect that’s the reasoning behind the decision.