PharmaTelevision - GlobeImmune’s Scientific Strategy

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Video title: GlobeImmune’s Scientific Strategy

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GlobeImmune’s CEO, Timothy Rodell, joined PharmaTelevision in San Francisco to talk about the company’s interesting origin and the exciting scientific concepts that it uses to target hepatitis infection and cancer. As a privately owned company coming to the end of a financing round the company is looking to raise money again, but as Dr. Rodell explains it may not necessarily be going to take its lead programmes through Phase III trials alone and could be seeking partners to work with by the end of 2009.

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The origin of GlobeImmune.

Fintan Walton:

Hello and welcome to PharmaVentures Business review here in San Francisco. On this show I have Tim Rodellwho is CEO of a company called GlobeImmune which is based in Boulder, Colorado here in the United States. Welcome to the show.

Timothy Rodell:

Thank you.

Fintan Walton:

Tim, GlobeImmuneis a company as I said based in Boulder, Colorado and it has got a interesting origin to the company and in particular the concept that has now developed into the company, so could you tell us about the origin and how that came about?

Timothy Rodell:

Right the company was founded by three scientists and I am not a company founder, was founded by 3 scientists in the University of Colorado who made actually a rather striking and somewhat unexpected observation I mean the observation was that if you take yeast and we're using the same of kind of yeast that are used to brew beer or bake bread and so Brewers used or bakers used, if you immunize an animal an ultimately a human with yeast what you generate, is you generate an immune response to the proteins that are inside the yeast that is strikingly different from other things that you could immunize in a animal or human with, and what is different about it is that the response that you get is a T-cell response it's not an antibody response. Most of things that we use as vaccines are designed to generate antibody responses but the component of the immune system that is most important for the things that we are treating is the T-cell response or cellular immunity and when you immunize with the yeast you get a response that is entirely a T-cell response. That response is directed at any protein that's inside the yeast. So the idea that the founders came up with was to essentially teach the yeast to make a new protein inside them and that protein can be a protein that is expressed in any cell we want to generate a response to. So if you wanna generate an immune response to a virally infected cell then we put a viral protein inside the yeast. If you wanna generate an immune response to a cancer cell, we put a cancerprotein inside the yeast.

Fintan Walton:

Right.

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Timothy Rodell

President and Chief Executive Officer

Dr. Rodell has been President and Chief Executive Officer of GlobeImmune, Inc. since 2004. From 1999 until 2002, Dr. Rodell was President and Chief Executive Officer of RxKinetix, Inc., a private drug delivery company that was sold to Endo Pharmaceuticals Holdings Inc. From 1996 until 2000, he held a number of positions at OXIS International, Inc., including Chief Technology Officer and President of OXIS International, SA, the company's French subsidiary, and led the Company's IPO on the Nouveau March of the Paris Bourse. From 1985 until 1995, Dr. Rodell was Executive Vice President of Operations and Product Development for Cortech, Inc. where he led all development of three clinical programs and co-led the Company's successful IPO. Dr. Rodell is also a founder of Barofold, Inc., a protein re-folding company. Before moving to industry, Dr. Rodell practiced academic Emergency Medicine, Internal Medicine and Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine. Dr. Rodell earned his M.D. from the University of North Carolina School of Medicine in 1980. He completed a residency in Internal Medicine and a fellowship in Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at the University of Colorado and is board certified in Internal Medicine and Pulmonary Medicine as well as being a Fellow of the American College of Chest Physicians. He completed post-doctoral fellowships in molecular biology and cell biology at the Eleanor Roosevelt Cancer Institute and the Webb Waring Institute respectively.

GlobeImmune

GlobeImmune ,is a privately-held biopharmaceutical company pioneering the discovery, development and manufacturing of potent, targeted molecular immunotherapies called Tarmogens for the treatment of cancer and infectious diseasesGI-5005, GlobeImmune's lead product for the treatment of chronic hepatitis infection, completed enrollment in May 2008 of a multi-center, randomized Phase 2 study. Additionally, GI-4000 for the treatment of Ras-mediated cancers, is currently being evaluated in multiple Phase 2 clinical trials including the treatment of resectable(early) pancreas cancer, NSCLC and locally advanced pancreas cancer. TarmogensTargetedMolecularImmunogens are whole, heat-killed recombinant S. cerevisiae yeast genetically modified to express one or more disease-related protein targets. The whole heat-killed yeast, with the antigen expressed inside, is the - that is administered to the patient. Tarmogens teach the cytotoxic T cells in the patient's immune system to eliminate any cell containing the target proteins expressed in the Tarmogens.