Stacy Lindborg

quite a few attempts at delivering IL-12.

And I think a lot of it comes back to how is it being delivered?

So a lot of the early attempts, and this even goes back to when immunotherapies were first being discovered, IL-12 was at the heart of the very exciting and very productive evolution for cancer treatments that have occurred with many, many tumors.

But with IL-12 in particular, many of the early attempts were actually administering recombinant 12 directly into the blood IV.

And what you would see is these massive spikes.

Actually, there's not a very long half-life.

There were very strong toxic effects.

There were even people that died in clinical trials.

So IL-12, while a very exciting, promising arena, ended up being very impossible to dose at a high F-level and do so safely.

And what we discovered was a way to bring it directly into where the tumors are,

to focus, that's exactly where you want to have the treatment, to allow cells to be manufacturing then this rather than delivering IL-12.

We're not actually administering IL-12, we're actually delivering a DNA plasmid that is allowing the body to produce it.

It keeps it contained, we're able to show that we don't see systemic distribution, therefore we got around the safety concern.

And I believe that because we're actually administering it interperitoneally, it actually is exactly where it needs to be and therefore the survival benefits that we see.

So I think the delivery, the mechanism of how to get it into the nucleus of the cell, not have degradation of the product needed.

There's a lot of technical things you had to overcome.

But the platform itself is the real innovation and harnessing science that's very well established.

So in the U.S., 20,000 women are diagnosed every year, and we see about pretty consistently 13,000 deaths.

At a worldwide level, it's 300,000 newly diagnosed.

So it is a...