Replies to post #73956 on NorthWest Biotherapeutics Inc (NWBO)

[DoGood_DoWell]

"Sometimes you hear of people in the back room of the lab injecting themselves," Schlesinger said. "That was not this. An immense amount of my last four years was spent on the paperwork," said Schlesinger, whose working relationship with Steinman dates back to her high school days, when she spent summers working in his lab.

She said Food and Drug Administration regulators were quick and responsive, but did not cut the team any slack. "Things that would have taken months to turn around, turned around in days," she said.

Nussenzweig took a portion of Steinman's tumor and used that to grow cells in the lab that would help form the basis of personalized cancer treatments.

There were no immunotherapy trials going on at Rockefeller at the time that could help Steinman, and to start from scratch would be too time-consuming.

"He had all of these friends and colleagues who offered basically whatever they had," Schlesinger said.

Steinman initially got an experimental vaccine called GVAX, which was first developed by Dr. Elizabeth Jaffee at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and is now being developed by BioSante Pharmaceuticals.

"The first set of dendritic cells he received, we gave him in collaboration with a biotech company called Argos Therapeutics," Schlesinger said.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-nobel-medicine-experiment-idUSTRE7956CN20111006

Although he may have received some funding from some cancer research organizations, neither they nor the FDA was of much help. Industry translated the science into therapies, and I would not be surprised to find out that as soon as he made this remarkable discovery about the power of dendritic cells, that his funding dried up.

I have seen this with other diseases. Scientists are funded by the big organizations until they get close to making the breakthrough, and the grants get pulled or not renewed.

I don't think you can make an effective argument that the charities have moved the needle much in most of the serious diseases such as cancer, diabetes, or Alzheimer's.