science

The Immune Response Corporation

The Immune Response Corporation is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand The Immune Response Corporation rather than just read about it. In short: The Immune Response Corporation (IRC) was a pharmaceutical company that worked in the development of immunotherapeutic products. The firm was founded by Jonas Salk and Kevin Kimberlin when Kimberlin, "asked Salk to become lead scientific advisor for a new biotech company specializing in 'anti-idiotypes,' a novel vaccine technology." Salk called the proposal "liberating." Overview Francis Crick once said about Salk…

Key takeaways

The Immune Response Corporation belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect The Immune Response Corporation to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of The Immune Response Corporation from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

The Immune Response Corporation (IRC) was a pharmaceutical company that worked in the development of immunotherapeutic products. The firm was founded by Jonas Salk and Kevin Kimberlin when Kimberlin, "asked Salk to become lead scientific advisor for a new biotech company specializing in 'anti-idiotypes,' a novel vaccine technology." Salk called the proposal "liberating."

Overview Francis Crick once said about Salk, "Few have made one discovery that has benefited humanity so greatly. Jonas was a man who, right to his last day, was actively in pursuit of another." The management team included CEO Jim Glavin, former CEO of Genetic Systems (acquired by Bristol Myers), and Chief Scientific Officer Dennis Carlo, a former Vice President of R&D at Hybritech. Joe O'Neill was appointed as CEO in 2005, because of his work as the chief architect of the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, known as PEPFAR. Corporate partners that supported IRC included Colgate, The Rorer Group, Rhone Poulenc, The Pasteur Institute, Institute Merieux, NovaRx, Agouron Pharmaceuticals, Bayer, and Pfizer. The company's shares were included in a public offering in 1990.

Products

Cancer Immunotherapy The company's anti-idiotype antibody program had a significant impact on the ultimate acceptance and success of cancer immunotherapy. It was based on research by Belgian biologist, Jacques Urbain, whom Kimberlin retained, and who reported to Jonas Salk. Urbain's idiotypic research showed a "dramatic enhancement of an antiviral immune response by dendritic cells," thus demonstrating the principle of a dendritic cell-enhanced immunity by means of anti-idiotype antibodies. He followed up with an anti-idiotype tumor vaccine against lymphocytes "not normally recognized" by the immune system. The Immune Response Corporation filed a patent on this invention entitled: "Idiotypic Vaccination Against B-Cell Lymphoma" in May 1990. IRC described the vaccination treatment as utilizing antigen-presenting dendritic cells to stimulate responses to tumor antigens. Preclinical studies published in 1994 in the European Journal of Immunology demonstrated that 8 out of 10 of the treated rats survived post-treatment, whereas the 10 control rats died. Nature Medicine later reported on an independent group of scientists at Stanford University who published results of a Phase I clinical trial using this technology to treat patients suffering from B-cell lymphoma. After incubation and pre-clinical validation by IRC, the dendritic cell product was licensed to a startup in exchange for founders stock, $500,000 in cash and royalties. Recognizing the potential for antigen-presenting dendritic cells, that startup changed its name to Dendreon. Its major investor was Paul Allen (Vulcan Ventures owned 22% of the company by the time it went public). Allen had been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's disease, often a precursor to B-cell lymphoma, the subject of the IRC/Urbain invention. The cell-based immune therapy, based on that invention, Sipuleucel-T, more commonly known as Provenge, became the first FDA-approved immunotherapeutic cancer vaccine. Sipuleucel-T, initially approved for treating patients with metastatic prostate cancer who have not responded to hormone therapy, was then recommended in 2015 by the National Comprehensive Cancer Network as a first-line treatment for patients with metastatic Castration Resistant Prostate Cancer. According to its manufacturer, the Sanpower Group, more than 40,000 men had been prescribed Sipuleucel-T as of 2017. After its U.S. market introduction, the process and facility that produced this immunotherapeutic became a key to the approval of Kymriah, the first CAR-T immunotherapy (chimeric antibody receptor T-Cell) to reach the market. Its developer, Novartis, required a complex manufacturing infrastructure capable of delivering an immunotherapeutic of consistent quality in order to produce the clinical and commercial quantities needed to obtain FDA approval. Since the team running the manufacturing facility were experts at producing and distributing the only commercially available cell-based cancer immunotherapy, Novartis bought the rights to the process and the FDA-approved facility and hired the 100 person team making the prostate cancer immunotherapy. On August 13, 2017, Kymriah became the world's first gene therapy to reach the market, an approval that was recognized by FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb with these remarks, "Today marks another milestone in the development of a whole new scientific paradigm of the treatment of serious diseases."

… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with The Immune Response Corporation

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what The Immune Response Corporation claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to The Immune Response Corporation before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about The Immune Response Corporation ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of The Immune Response Corporation

In research: The Immune Response Corporation appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses The Immune Response Corporation in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: The Immune Response Corporation is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Biotechnology companies of the United States, Immunotherapy, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for The Immune Response Corporation outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

Ask Teacher Smith questions about this articleOpens your AI tutor with a question about “The Immune Response Corporation” →

Affiliate

Preply — study more efficiently by working with a personal tutor. 50% off.

How to study The Immune Response Corporation in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what The Immune Response Corporation means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain The Immune Response Corporation out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is The Immune Response Corporation in simple terms?

Why does The Immune Response Corporation matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study The Immune Response Corporation?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on The Immune Response Corporation.