Avid Bioservices Inc (CDMO)

[EYEBUYSTOX]

I read that earlier, and there's no way all the top Genentech scientists are there to map genomes.

There was one word that struck me as "off" and made me point to the MD Anderson project: Moonshot.

Here's the blurb from in your link from Google:

Illness and aging affect all our families,” declared Page in an announcement of Calico’s launch on Google’s blog. “With some longer-term, moonshot thinking around healthcare and biotehnology, I believe we can improve millions of lives.”

Here's MD Anderson announcing its moonshot program on Sept. 21, 2012. (Why did it have to be that date?)

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/md-anderson-to-spend-3-billion-in-all-out-moonshot-push-to-tackle-8-cancers/

The reversion back to the basics of tumor biology and its importance in the future of cancer treatment has been widely accepted by pharma worldwide.

Here's a clip from a relevant interview:

The structure of the tumour itself, the stroma, is also a barrier. Additionally, the inside of the tumour is a hypoxic environment which ends up attracting a variety of suppressive immune cells, that again cause immune suppression in the tumour microenvironment. As you can imagine, it is very difficult to get around all of these hurdles, and every day we learn more and more about additional evasion mechanisms that we didn’t know were at play.

This is why the new checkpoint inhibitor compounds are so appealing. They are designed to reset the balance within the tumour microenvironment and level the playing field for the immune system to fight tumours. Without this rebalancing at the tumour level, cancer vaccines have struggled to successfully treat cancer. With this rebalancing, we may be able to use cancer vaccines in more advanced cancer patients. From the failures in the field of cancer vaccine, we know that cancer vaccines when used as monotherapies cannot do anything meaningful to an established tumour.

That leaves two choices. You can either utilize cancer vaccines in patients who do not have a lot of tumour bulk, those with minimal residual disease, where you’re trying to prevent micrometastases from occurring and delay progression. Or you have to look at aggressive treatment combinations where you influence the tumour itself (checkpoint inhibitors) so it becomes more receptive to T cell infiltration (cancer vaccines). That is why you really need to consider a combination approach for effective cancer immunotherapy.

- See more at: http://www.vaccinenation.org/2014/03/04/combination-therapies-cancer-treatment/#sthash.NFo44nfI.dpuf