Published November 2000

Biotech company searches for cancer therapy

By Kathy Day
Herald Economy Writer

BOTHELL — Dan Wilds gets a lot of calls from people with prostate cancer.

As chief executive officer of Northwest Biotherapeutics, he hopes some day to be able to tell them there is a product to help. For now, he points them to the American Cancer Society and to major research institutes.

He also can tell them about his company’s efforts to find a primary treatment for the kind of metastic prostate cancer that will account for about 32,000 deaths this year.

Wilds says it appears the company may have found a way to use a type of the patient’s own white blood cells — called dendritic cells — to carry a vaccine to stop the disease in its tracks.

By the time someone calls Wilds, often the only help is self-help groups or other counseling, he said. He likened the pain these men feel to “terrible, terrible arthritis” and said that only pain medications can help.

“It’s a very difficult last year,” he said.

Having watched his mother die of metastic breast cancer when he was younger, he knows the pain. It was then, he said, that he knew he wanted to do something to fight cancer.

His venture, still privately held, has unusual roots. Unlike many biotech companies built around university research or spun out from a larger company, Northwest Biotherapeutics came from a hospital setting.

Northwest Hospital and the Pacific Northwest Cancer Foundation were hard at work seeking ways to help their cancer patients.

Dr. Alton Boynton, Director of the hospital’s Department of Molecular Medicine, working with the late Dr. Gerald Murphy, had identified apparently safe technology that helped prostate cancer patients live longer.

“Some of those patients in 1995 and 1996 were told they had a year to live,” Wilds said. Some are still alive today.

With $3 million in seed capital from the hospital and with Boynton and Murphy as founders, the company was formed in 1996; Wilds joined as CEO in 1997.

Recently, the company’s 42 employees moved into new headquarters in Canyon Park. The 35,000-square-foot facility houses offices, research and manufacturing spaces and adjacent labs for a staff of 12 from the Molecular Medicine Department of Northwest Hospital.

The hospital/foundation staff’s work is funded totally by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the Association for the Cure of Prostate Cancer, an organization founded by former junk-bond king Michael Milken in 1993 after he was diagnosed with the disease.

“The benefits of the interaction between the pure academic researchers and those who are commercially oriented are exciting,” Wilds said. “The academics ask why something happens, and we take it and transfer it to a commercial product.”

In April, the company raised its third round of investment capital from private investors, and Wilds is now looking for about $15 million more to enable the company to advance its efforts.

By next year, he said, it is likely the company will go public to raise the capital needed for later-stage trials on the prostate product and to start trials in treating lung and kidney cancers and glioblastoma, a particularly deadly brain cancer that often affects children.

More immediate, though, is the ongoing trial with 60 patients who have tried other therapies for prostate cancer without success.

It’s under way at UCLA Medical Center and M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. In each case, the patient’s cells are manipulated in the lab and reintroduced as a vaccine to stimulate the body’s cancer-killing T-cells.

But it will take a lot more work to get the product to market. So Wilds is likely to get a lot more calls from patients before he can just tell them to call their doctor and ask for a new product.

To find out more, go to www.nwbio.com, www.capcure.org or www.cancer.org.

Back to the top/November 2000 Main Menu