ARTICLES BY WAYNE KOBERSTEIN

• Our Annual Cancer Immuno-oncology Update 2018

  11/12/2018

  This year’s IO update is more compact because the essential story has contracted. The odds of success have shifted dramatically and disparately among the various players — all due to Merck’s Keytruda.

• Apellis Advances On Autoimmunity

  11/12/2018

  The unusual story of how Apellis was formed and what led it to target C3, the central factor in the innate-immunity complement system, to treat autoimmune diseases — starting with the ultra-rare blood condition, PNH.

• Fibrocell: Where Gene Therapy Meets Synthetic Biology

  8/2/2018

  “We had to decide whether to spend a lot of money to bring on a sales force and marketing team, and expand manufacturing to meet demand, or take our resources and refocus them on these rare disorders.”  

• PolarityTE: Beyond Cells, To Whole Tissue

  2/7/2018

  In this series on "Life Science Leadership In Action," we discuss PolarityTE, which focuses on regenerating lost tissues in their original complex forms.

• Our Annual Cancer Immunotherapy Update

  6/7/2017

  When we started our series, “Combination Cancer Immunotherapy — A Virtual Roundtable,” in 2014, our basic assumptions were not the consensus view. We assumed immunotherapy, now more commonly called immuno-oncology (IO), would become the dominant form of cancer treatment and central target of academic and industry research in oncology. We assumed a single, backbone therapy would become the pillar around which combinations of therapeutics with complementary targets would form. And we assumed the IO field, especially in its combination approaches, would pose profound scientific and business challenges as it took over as the central focus of oncology in general. Our assumptions turned out to be correct. Now, all IO has to do is catch up with itself.

• Cancer Immunotherapy - Simpler Or More Complex?

  9/1/2016

  A summary of the issues that recently fired up the IO field.

• Developing New Therapeutics For Progressive MS

  6/1/2016

  This is the concluding installment of our three-part series on new therapeutic mechanisms for neurodegenerative diseases. Here, as in the first two parts, we have brought together a “virtual roundtable” comparing the views of key scientific opinion leaders with some of the companies developing new therapeutics for progressive MS. (See Part One, “Aiming at Alzheimer’s,” March 2016, and Part Two, “Parsing Out Parkinson’s,” April 2016.)