Genitope: Patient-specific manufacturing

One major stumbling block to the promise of personalized medicines is manufacturing, which by definition produces high volumes of identical product over and over. Genitope Corp., which plans to commercialize a protein therapy specific to individual lymphoma patients, has created a manufacturing process that allows the company to turn genetic information from each patient's tumor into an immune stimulant directed specifically against the malignancy.

The company's formation resulted from the convergence of two independent developments. First, Ronald Levy, chief of the division of oncology at Stanford University's Department of Medicine developed a patient-specific therapy for B cell lymphoma patients that turns the patients' immune mechanisms against their diseased B cells. The second was founder Dan Denney's development of a method for reliably obtaining high volumes of proteins from mammalian cells. Denney's method turned out to resolve a primary sticking point for Levy's therapy...