Susan Desmond-Hellmann
speaker
362 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Susan Desmond-Hellmann’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
So you'd get a twofer. In fact, another company has one, AstraZeneca, that's so powerful with a bystander effect, you don't even have to have overexpression. So that antibody, I'm talking about it now because anybody in breast cancer knows about her too.
You see it on TV in direct-to-consumer ads.
It is, yeah.
I mention that because it seems impossible. There was a lot of people at Genentech who were negative about Terceptin. Did not think we should invest. The dogma was that antibodies were all hype. They'd been overpromised as smart bombs, smart missiles, Time magazine, all of this, but that they had flopped.
I don't think the things had even been commercialized. I don't think they had gotten out of the clinic, that people just weren't seeing benefit. I have a very good friend who's an oncologist, and he said, you just can't treat a solid tumor, a solid tumor versus leukemia or lymphoma, with an antibody. You need something more powerful.
And remember what was happening at the same time is, if you want to talk about the history of oncology, The amazing thing is being at ASCO, the American Society of Clinical Oncology, and two different rooms. One room, we hear that Herceptin is going to change forever how we think about antibodies in breast cancer. Way better than we thought, improved survival.
The other room doing bone marrow transplant for breast cancer and having the South African group who published a paper saying it worked retract the paper and go through and talk about how much of it was fraudulent, fraud, fraud, fraud.
So at the same time, this nearly toxic, nearly lethal bone marrow transplant for breast cancer was debunked at the same time as we said what we call now a naked antibody. No payload, no chemo. You give Herceptin, you're going to help that patient with breast cancer. Just an antibody. Welcome to modern oncology. It could not have been more clear.
And it was a distraction because people felt like you just needed to hit the cancer hard. You just needed to hit the cancer smart. Hard wasn't the point.
Yes. But don't forget Rituxan. Yes. So when I said people didn't believe in you could treat a solid tumor, they thought you could treat lymphoma because we did. Antibodies were so disliked. People did not believe in antibodies that in 95, 96 years, IDEC was going to run out of money.
So IDEC had made an antibody to CD20, a very important marker on all lymphomas, and they were going to run out of money. So some of our business development folks talked to them about Genentech doing a deal with them on rituxim. It is impossible to overstate how important rituxim is in lymphoma.
I often think when I'm in product development of patients I've cared for, I had this great 83-year-old pharmacist when I was in practice. And he had a lymphoma that was low grade, a little tired. He was fine. And so we did watch and wait, my not favorite strategy of oncology. Let's watch and wait as you dwindle. He'd be a perfect candidate for Rituxan. Four doses, you can repeat it.
In fact, it works so well. Here's when I changed my mind on antibodies. Somebody runs in my office and said, oh, we have a case of tumor lysis syndrome. So tumor lysis syndrome being somebody got rituxan, they had a lot of lymphoma, and the cells are breaking down so fast their kidneys can't keep up and they have to be dialyzed. Oh, that's only an antibody. No chemo, no payload, nothing.
That's when you know you've got a good drug.
It's mainly a B cell.
I think 19 and 20 are both B cells. I'd have to look at it to see.
Yeah.
It's chimeric, yeah.
Well, that's the other thing that I think is, there's so many dogmas that we believe until data proves otherwise. So one of the warts of rituximab was thought that it was a chimera. It had too many mouse parts to human parts, and that we would cause human antichimeric antibody, HACA. And FDA was very concerned about this. So we measured and measured and measured.
And it turned out, probably because the patients had lymphoma, that they didn't get HACA. Very tiny numbers and they're not clinically relevant. And you can treat them a lot. You can treat patients over and over again. Herceptin is 93% human, so not a chimera, but not fully humanized.
Showing 141–160 of 362 · page 8 of 19
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