Thank you for this opportunity to comment. Ill read my comment so as to stay brief.

My name is
Andrew Gengos and I am president and CEO of ImmunoCellular Therapeutics which is the company
developing the treatment contemplated in this grant application. Id like to give you a sense for how
important this potential funding is to brain cancer patients who really dont have many treatment
options and have not seen much innovation in over a decade.
ImmunoCellullar is a small California-based biotechnology company. We currently have 6 full time
employees and are a publicly listed company. For some time now I have been meeting with investor
groups that focus at least some of their capital on public biotechnology companies. To be clear,
biotechnology treatment development programs are risky and we all know that there is a large failure
rate in the clinical trial process leading to FDA registration. In glioblastoma any phase 3 registrational
trial is going to take a long time to execute because the FDA requires Overall Survival as the
registrational endpoint. We project our phase 3 program will require 5 years to execute. Frankly, this
time period is outside the interest of most public market investors in terms of their investment horizon
and therefor in their eyes handicaps our project compared to other projects that can execute in a
shorter timeframe.
The result is that investment capital is hard to come by for these types of promising and highly
innovative therapies when the investment horizon is long and a small company without product
revenues is at the helm. We therefor also considered other potential sources of capital including
government and philanthropic entities. CIRMs interest in ICT-107 our dendritic cell immunotherapy
that targets cancer stem cells in glioblastoma is crucial for many reasons. Let me elaborate on two:
First, their independent scientific review and endorsement of our program represents an objective
validation of our dendritic cell immunotherapy technology. This is a signal to the scientific and financial
communities that the program has genuine potential.
Second, their potential financial support of this program truly enables us to execute this phase 3
program and deliver on our promise to brain cancer patients to push this promising technology forward.
I do not think it is an overstatement to say that without CIRMs support, this program would not go
forward. Californias innovative biotechnology community needs institutions like CIRM. Clearly we
need CIRM. Brain cancer patients need CIRM.
So in conclusion, and on behalf of all my colleagues at ImmunoCellular, I would like to thank CIRM for
their consideration of this worthwhile project. We are deeply and humbly in your debt for the potential
support you will provide us and how it will enable us to deliver for these patients.
Thank you again for the opportunity to comment.