Month: August 2020

The prostate cancer vaccine pipeline is littered with casualties – from the commercial failure of Dendreon Corporation’s approved Provenge (sipuleucel-T) to the late-stage clinical failure of Bavarian Nordic A/S’s Prostvac (rilimogene galvacirepvec) monotherapy and CureVac BV’s mRNA-based CV9104. And time and again, while cancer vaccines across a range of tumor types have shown promise in stimulating an immune response, they have subsequently failed to show clinical improvement in key endpoints that matter to patients, like overall survival.

Just over 140 years ago, the world’s first industrial-sized research and development laboratory opened. As someone who has devoted his working life to finding new research and development breakthroughs, I am envious of the explosion of activity that made the lab’s owner, Thomas Edison, one of history’s most remarkable inventors. But it’s his process of innovation that inspires me, as much as his life-changing creations.

From clinical practice to academia to biotech to big pharma: Paul Peter Tak has covered most of the bases when it comes to medicine.

How did you first find your way into the pharmaceutical industry?

I consider myself primarily a physician, but my objective has always been to try and touch the lives of patients. I’d practiced for many, many years as a rheumatologist and after my PhD I became a Professor of Medicine in Amsterdam at the Academic Medical Centre of the University of Amsterdam, and during this period I realised that if you want to make a medicine you need another entity to make this possible. During that time I also worked with many biotech firms and pharmaceutical companies as a consultant. Ultimately, I decided to join GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) with the idea that if I could make a medicine there, it could potentially affect the lives of billions of patients, rather than maybe hundreds or thousands that you can do as an academic professor.