It was an order of magnitude more difficult to raise VC money for biotech back then.

These days you can even raise a seed with no experimental data. That was extraordinarily unusual even well into the 2000s.

There are articles around discussing how in case of Alzheimer's it was impossible to get VC funding for immune ideas, even though they already had interesting evidence.

The same cabal was also blocking them.

I think you need to be an insider to realize how incredibly political most research in medicine is.