Sunday, 12/14/2014 6:53:48 PM
Northwest Biotherapeutics – Linda Powers’ Speech Transcript at the Oppenheimer 25th Annual Health Conference on 12-10-14.
Linda Powers: Yeah. We talk about this. Yeah, we talk about it all the time, because if this technology continues to perform in the way it has been so far and if it's going to applicable to most solid tumor cancers, you're talking about, not 10s of thousands of patients, you're talking of 100s and 100s of thousands of patients for whom it could be a fit.[color=red][/color] Umm, today the process, umm, the process is to, for the first product, DCVax-L, it's a manual process. For DCVax Direct, it's already partially-automated, the automation system. The answer can only be automation. Right? But, from a business standpoint, there's a point in which the lines cross. Right. We want to get to market and get the product to patients, as quickly as possible. Right, so we're going to do that the way that we're making it now. But, we're busily working, as is anyone who thinks about the future with a cell-therapy product, about end-to-end automation. And one of things about end-to-end automation is, is that it's both a capacity issue, a scale issue, because once you're fully automated in the end, you can virtually treat any number of patients. The other thing is, what people don't often realize is, it's going to further revolutionize your product economics. Why? Because when you make it by hand and there are steps that are open to the air, the whole facility has to be sterile, like a semi-conductor facility. It's massively capital intensive. And that's the biggest part of the finished cost of goods, is those indirect cost of that clean room infrastructure. Once it is automated end-to-end, that all goes out of the equation, because you just have rows and rows of these machines in a warehouse space. So you couple that with the batch manufacturing, and it's a step-change in terms of further enhancement of the economics. And so, everyone is busily working on automation. Umm, we think that's a couple-of-year process from where we are today. And we're working from some of the biggest and the best from all over the world.
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