Even as the US-Cuba relationship changes, bringing a growing numbers of tourists, the island remains in many ways frozen in time; when Phillips was last there in the spring, he was driven around by a cabbie in a '55 Buick. But a striving, modern biotech enterprise thrives in Cuba, too. It's a legacy of the US embargo: With drugs from the US unavailable, Cuba had to develop its own pharmaceutical industry. Among its biggest accomplishments is a novel treatment for lung cancer called CimaVax.
The Cuban data on CimaVax is promising, prompting an American oncologist at Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, N.Y., to make plans to submit an application to the Food and Drug Administration this summer for a 70-patient trial to test the drug's safety — in what would likely be the first-ever US clinical trial of a Cuban therapy.
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