Chapter 5 serious case of Cuba's biotech Revolution:

Inmate September 2018, a United States human biotech joint venture was established to trial and deliver CIMAvax-EGF, an Innovative Cuban lung cancer immunotherapy treatment to patients in the United States. Innovative immunotherapy Alliance essay was set up by Buffalo based Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center and Havana Center for molecular Immunology (CIM), an Institutional collaboration which benefited from the tentative reproachment between the United States and Cuba in 2015 and 2016 the sheer fact that such an entity should exist is scientifically and politically groundbreaking for several reasons. First, it testifies to the extraordinary development of biotechnology in cuba, which has been largely overlooked in medical science and business History Literature on the field. Second, despite six Decades of the United States blockade obstructing Cuba's foreign trade, external financing, technology transfers and scientific exchange, including in the medical field, it is the Cubans who have contributed the Innovative science to this joint venture; they have cracked a difficult nut, using immunotherapy to combat cancer. Third, while Global biopharma is associated with speculative, mostly private, capital, the Cuban industry is entirely state-owned and financed. The emergence of Havana's scientific Poll for example, was the result of State planning, not of Market forces attracting private interests to a given location. The Cuban state was motivated by socioeconomic and Welfare concerns, not simply economic gains. Force, well domestic production of medical drugs and supplies was an imperative forced on Cuba by the US blockade, particularly in the post-soviet era, the historical development of Medical Science on the island, with its focus on parasitology and immunotherapy, was also decisive. So is the involvement from the outset of researchers and biophysics and nuclear physics with the technological and instrumental knowledge necessary to construct the first Cuban laboratories, the collaboration between Roswell Park and cim begin when the Cuban researcher guisela Gonzalez, who is visiting her family in Pittsburgh in 2011, cold called the Roswell Park Cancer Center in buffalo, new york, to tell them about a lung cancer vaccine developed by Cuba's cim. They invited her to give a presentation about the simivax vaccine. Dr Kelvin lee, chairman of Roswell Department of Immunology told me his reaction: quote gazella came up and gave a great Immunology talk. I'm sitting there thinking " why would that ever work? Quote then she goes on to show it works and that they have done all of these clinical trials. My good friend from California sitting next to me said " the Cubans just throw out chapter 1 of every Immunology textbook we know and quote and it's like that's really clever, we would have never thought to do that. Dr Lee admits that this was a revelation; he had an outdated, romantic image of Cuba from the I Love Lucy days, the 1950s, tropicana, and all that. We hadn't really thought about Cuba progressing forward from that time. With little contact between Cuba and the United States for nearly 60 years he says, quote they were really flying under the radar ". Roswell Park took the Bane and shortly afterwards Lee attended an international Immunology convention in Havana he was impressed by the number of innovative scientists doing the remarkable research at cim. Quote who would have guessed that there was a medium-sized pharmaceutical company that had integrated its basic research all the way through to commercial production in one plant? They were adapting very sophisticated Technologies to their economic constraints. Cuban scientists don't have a lot of resources to burn so they think very carefully about what they're going to do before they even start. They are very thoughtful thorough planners ellipses it was unexpected. The degree of sophistication, the size of their efforts. The fact that Fidel Castro saw this is something is very important, at the dawn of the biotech era, and really pushed it forward. It was all unexpected and very exciting!"