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The private jet took off from the Caribbean island of Antigua in April carrying three highly flammable tanks of compressed oxygen and a terminally ill cancer patient.
Kim Hudlow had chartered the plane for her husband, David. She crouched by his side on the five-hour journey to Florida, frantically adjusting the valve on one of the oxygen tanks as he struggled to breathe. A doctor had just told her he was dying. She was terrified he wouldn’t survive the flight.
ExThera, a California start-up, makes a single product: a filter that it says can be used to remove the tumor cells that circulate in patients’ blood and enable cancer to metastasize. The company sold thousands of the devices to a private equity firm, which began using them on late-stage cancer patients at a small clinic in Antigua.
Quadrant, the private equity firm, charged $45,000 for each course of treatment and advised patients to return to the clinic for regular sessions. It also urged them to abstain from chemotherapy between treatments.
ExThera and Quadrant promoted the blood filtering to the Hudlows and other couples by citing a Croatian study of patients with metastatic cancer that they said had yielded extraordinary results.
The Hudlows, along with another couple, paid $90,000 each for the treatments, which took place in March. But instead of improving, the patients’ conditions worsened, and all three died in April.
One of the patients, Kyle Chupp, was diagnosed with metastatic abdominal cancer and died on April 19 after his treatment. His wife said ExThera told them to delay his scheduled chemotherapy and radiation by telling them that the patients who had fared the best in the Croatian study hadn’t had chemotherapy or radiation beforehand.
At least six of the patients who received the treatment have died since their treatments.
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