For student Wei Zexi, the lure of a miracle cure was hard to resist: he was dying from a rare cancer and a well-known Beijing hospital was offering treatment with an 80 per cent chance of success and no side effects. It was, the hospital said, the ideal choice.
There was a problem: The military-run hospital did not have regulatory approval to offer the immunotherapy course it sold to Wei at a steep fee. The treatment itself – while promising – is widely considered by global cancer specialists to be at the experimental stage.