The Burzynski clinic has ever so many trials

I'm not sure what to make of the Burzynski Clinic. Twitter is currently filling up with the disturbing news that one of their PR people has sent the blogger @lecanardnoir a threatening lawyerly type letter (which you can read, along with his response, on his blog).

This coincides with the fact that there is a benefit gig happening tonight with some big names - the purpose is to raise money to send a little girl with cancer to the Burzynski Clinic in the US for a treatment for which, as far as anyone can tell, there isn't enough evidence that any benefits outweigh the risks. There are some testimonials but those don't count unfortunately.

It's surprising that there's not much evidence because there are so many trials ongoing, 61 according to one of the clinical trials register - ClinicalTrials.gov. This is a basic search for any record that includes the word Burzynski anywhere within it so I should be cautious before drawing any major conclusions because a trial might be nothing to do with them but just reference them...

As far as I'm aware a trial registration isn't an indication of quality or whether or not the trial is a fair test of a treatment, merely that it's been registered.

Of these 61 trials:

10 are recruiting
35 are of unknown status
7 are withdrawn
2 are terminated
1 is completed - it began in March 1996 and was completed in 2005. Its clinical identifier is NCT00003509 and this does not appear anywhere in PubMed.
5 are active, not recruiting
1 is not yet recruiting

There are plenty of trials published by Burzynski about antineoplastons (the name of the intervention) although they don't seem to match up with the clinical trials registration (I've not looked at all of them so it's certainly possible that some of them do).

It seems there was a big trial but that it fell apart amidst big fights...