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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
And none of the patients treated with antibodies that I've seen, not with Genentech or IDEC antibodies, have really had problems. They've had other problems based on target-related problems, not based on the antibody.
Straight naked antibody.
It's targeted to destroy the CD20 positive cells. But it turns out that if you have lymphoma, you've got a reserve in your marrow of other CD20 cells of more immature that grow up and replace. So it's not like you're really at a huge risk for untoward reactions from your CD20 antibody.
I can guess. I don't know if anyone's done a formal study. I do think at some point in oncology treatment, if you have a tiny amount of disease left, especially something like lymphoma, you may take care of it yourself.
And honestly, if it comes back, that's the other thing that I find really interesting about antibodies. The dogma with chemotherapy, if you are on Taxol and your tumor comes back, I wouldn't give you Taxol again. If you're on Herceptin or Rituxan and your tumor comes back, in a heartbeat, I'd give it to you again. Yeah, it's a very different thing than chemotherapy.
Probably they were. I think Taxol kind of went to that next level and then they went the further level compared to today's prices low. But Rituxan, I think more than Herceptin, because people started using it more, like you'd use four times or eight times and recurring, Rituxan sales went very high, very fast.
Yeah.
At Boston Children's. Yeah.
Oh, you didn't meet him?
Yeah. I don't remember.
I'm smiling because I had a word for Judah Folkman talks, which I heard many of. He was a phenomenologist. Yeah. He would say, this patient had this, so it must mean that. He just connected dots all the time. I mean, some of it made no sense to me, but some of it was like, wow, I wish I thought of that. He was just a really fun person to listen to. I used to tell this story so many times.
His thing was the cancer can't grow larger than a BB if it doesn't have new blood vessels. That was his thing. It stuck at a certain size. And so VEGF is the primary way, vascular endothelial growth factor, is the primary way that you grow new blood vessels if you're a tumor cell. People went crazy about this hypothesis.
It was more than the TPO that I was describing because it was due to Folkman and he's very compelling and very charismatic. And just because the hypothesis really- It's logical. It's logical. It resonates. It sounds like a good thing.
Napo Ferrara, also a great character, Italian OBGYN who came to Genentech and worked in one of the labs, made an antibody, actually same backbone as Herceptin, to VEGF.
Mostly human. Again, I think about 93, 94% human. And so we decided we should go after an antibody for VEGF as our next big oncology program. I still remember, by the way, one of the things that Gwen Fyfe, who's a great clinical oncology trials expert, was in charge of the program. And Gwen and I talked the day before the first patient was going to get treated with anti-VEGF.
And Gwen said, my nightmare is that all the blood vessels fall apart. We've just put that into someone's body. And I said, well, you know, we did all the tox studies. We're like, I don't think it's going to be that bad, but we have no idea what, I mean, it just felt- And I'm sorry, this was before the first phase one patient? This was the first phase one patient.
But the first human dosing of anti-VEGF, and we knew how important VEGF was. So we were scared.
They'd just gotten there.
Yeah, it was wild. It was wild.
So we're into the clinic and we make progress and it's really good news and lots of studies and we're ambitious. We want to do a lot of different, we wanted to do lung cancer and we ought to do breast cancer.
Showing 161–180 of 362 · page 9 of 19
← Previous
Next →