Back, everyone. Happy to bring back Jim Frakes, CEO and CFO of Aethlon Medical. Trades on the Nasdaq AEMD. It's a medical therapeutic company focused on developing products to treat cancer and life-threatening infectious diseases. Welcome back, Jim. Now, since we last talked, you released news on the potential utility of your chemo purifiers used to treat long COVID. So we definitely want to hear your update and focus in on this exciting finding.
Thanks, Anna, and happy to be back, updating everybody on Aethlon Medical. We have been working behind the scenes with a very prestigious group at the University of California at San Francisco Hospital. There really are experts on long COVID. They have a number of patient samples. They send us plasma of long COVID patients and then controls to see if our device could bind extracellular vesicles that may play a role in long COVID, as well as the spike protein, which remains in the long COVID patients. We're a small company, as anybody that follows us knows. When I became CEO, I focused our efforts on cancer, and that remains our primary emphasis. Once we teed up everything for the oncology trials in India and Australia, that freed up our lab to work on these precious long COVID samples that we've had stored for a while.
They've done a lot of research. Our results were very interesting. We shared them with the UC San Francisco team. They encouraged us to apply to a very high-end conference called the Keystone Conference in August. We were accepted to present or to a poster presentation at that conference. Once the conference happens, we'll post the numbers, the actual results. It's preliminary. It was cost-effective because we only paid for the transportation of the samples to our lab here in San Diego. People that don't have long COVID probably aren't aware of this, but the CDC has estimated that the prevalence of long COVID is between 6% and 7% of the entire general population. It's a massive number, between 44 million and 48 million people in the United States that suffer from this affliction. Brain fog, feeling tired all the time.
There are a number of symptoms. The U.S. government spent $1 billion, and they haven't found a therapy, a cure, just kind of Band-Aids. It is very early. I don't want to overstate the importance of this to Aethlon and our shareholders. I'm hopeful that with our preliminary work, there are possible government grant opportunities here. We are going to continue to work on it, albeit it's not our primary focus. It is exciting. It is a real market. It is a real problem for 44-48 million of our fellow Americans. It's awful.
Absolutely. You also had a recent publication in May.
Level of response on it to the long COVID question.
OK, wonderful. Thank you, Jim. Do you want to talk about your recent publication in May? It supported evaluating your chemo purifier not only in oncology and infectious diseases, but also in organ transplantation and other areas of unmet medical needs. Can we talk a little bit more about that?
Sure, sure. Happy to. Our device binds, and I should show it. I always forget to do that. It is an extracorporeal device that fits on blood pumping machines like dialysis machines or plasmapheresis machines that are in hospitals and clinics worldwide. Our product does bind these extracellular vesicles. We used to call them exosomes, but the term of art now is extracellular vesicles or EVs. We have originally focused on cancer because tumors emit tremendous numbers of EVs. Other diseases like MS also emit EVs. It is possible that by capturing them, we could play a role there. Once we finished getting ready for the oncology trial, we turned our lab because it was a very logical next step. They have honed their techniques of measuring changes in EVs in cancer.
We had them switch to measuring EVs in long COVID and also in these other disease states. It's interesting. We're applying for some patent protection in that space. It's a logical connection to our work in oncology with the EV reduction approach.
Perfect. Are there any updates you can share on your oncology trials in Australia and India?
Sure. Let me talk about India first. We've kind of been hung up for a number of months. They've changed their regulations in India. It was originally changing import-export regulations, and now at least medical devices, if not all life sciences. So we've gone through a whole exercise in hoop jumping with many meetings. We do expect that we should be able to talk about actually starting that fairly soon. The signs are good. We're through a lot. They changed a lot of the rules. It used to be pretty easy to get things going in India. That's not the case anymore. We think we're poised to start that soon. In terms of the work in Australia, we have more tangible events there. I think the last time we spoke, I mentioned we have three hospitals that had signed up to run our clinical trial.
One was in Adelaide. That's where the first patient was treated at the end of January. The number two hospital was in Gold Coast, north of Sydney, relatively small population-wise. It's not a major city. The third hospital, by far the largest hospital that we're working with, is affiliated with the University of Sydney. Now, Sydney is a big city. I just looked up today what the greater Sydney area represents in population. It's 5.2 million people versus Adelaide, which is about 1.4 million people. A much bigger population base. We're affiliated with the major university in town. It took them longer. There were burdensome logistics to go through with them. They're through the process now. We're very pleased with their recruiting efforts and patient recruiting efforts. I'd like to say we hope to have some news on that front quite soon.
I usually don't make such a strong statement, but we're very excited about the work going on there. It's our primary focus. One, at the risk of being redundant for people that have heard this before, it's a safety trial. It's designed for patients with solid tumors who have stable or progressive, meaning getting worse, disease during anti-PD-1 monotherapy treatment, such as Keytruda or Opdivo, which are very popular, unfortunately, for the patients, drugs. It's a safety trial. Three patients in the first cohort, which is one treatment. Assuming all three patients are treated safely, there will be an outside safety board making a decision to proceed to the second cohort, which will be two treatments in a week. If the safety board deems that it's been a safe treatment, we'll go on to the third cohort of three times in a week.
It is basically a dose-finding escalation measurement exercise to see how many times the best treatment would be for cancer patients to receive chemo purifier treatments. Following the first patient treated in January, we need two more to fill out the first cohort. We are shooting to have that happen soon. That would lead to some important events, the decision by this independent safety board to proceed or not proceed. We will have the University of Sydney's lab we have retained to analyze reductions in EVs and T cell markers and immune response to our therapy. I have been waiting 10 years to see that kind of information. I am excited for when we get to that point. We have some major, major for our little company milestones coming soon, we hope.
Wonderful. That's wonderful to hear. Happy to hear this update and just continue to come back on, Jim, and give us these updates. We really appreciate it.
Great. Thanks again for the forum to speak.
Wonderful. OK, everyone, it's been a great first day of our two-day conference. Thank you so much for joining us. We will see you back here tomorrow morning, 9:00 A.M. Eastern start time, for day two of our Super Virtual Investor Conference. We'll see you tomorrow.