Thank you for having me.
I was going to introduce the idea of our cancer, first of all. We are a cancer. We're sometimes not regarded as a cancer, but we're highly malignant, and it grows rapidly. It comes from the neuroendocrine cells in the body, and we need a variety of treatments.
When neuroendocrine cells produce too many peptides and hormones, they cause tumours to grow, and they can grow uncontrollably and you can eventually die from tumour load. One of the things that stops our tumours in their tracks is a variety of treatments, including radioisotope treatments, which are available right now in just about every country in the world. Lutetium and yttrium are available in Cuba, Bangladesh, India, Australia, Singapore, all over Europe, South America, everywhere. They extend our lives by many years. I've been a patient for 10 years. I haven't yet needed to use lutetium or yttrium, but many patients have.
One of the big problems is that not only do patients have to go out of the country, but they can lose their houses over it, because it's sudden. You're given two weeks' warning to go to England. The caregiver and the patient go out of country--with the isotope, possibly, on the same plane--and sometimes it's four treatments in a year. Once you take accommodation into account, it's $50,000. The money is very significant. Patients sometimes can't go because they can't afford to get on a plane. They just sit at home and wait for the end.
So I'd say about two-thirds of the patients who are approved can go and the others can't. They have to rely on less effective options.
One last thing. In Sweden, where they're quite common, the life expectancy is probably about four times as long as here. I remember Dr. Öberg at our Toronto conference in 2009 saying that it's 133 months or something for people once they're on isotope treatment, as opposed to 33 months in North America, in Canada, with certain isotopes.
Thank you.