Is anyone out there following Stressgen (SSB on VSE)?
Stressgen is developing drugs based on stress proteins, which are
produced naturally by cells when they are under attack or stress.
Trials on rats with Stressgen products have produced elevated immune response for over a year now (!) as well as tumour suppression.
Possible uses for stress protein products (often spliced onto viral bits): anti-cancer and (which interests me most) a replacement for antibiotics (which have by now created new strains of drug-resistant bugs.)
It appears that Stressgen's research also has diagnostic possibilities: their work suggests the possibility of using the analysis of the production of these proteins to study the effect of environmental pollution on human subjects. (The relation between amounts of a pollutant in the environment and its effect on a living person isn't linear; study of stress protein production can be an avenue for the assessing of the degree of effect of a certain concentration of a pollutant in the environment.)
The company has an interesting web site:
stressgen.com
lots of the science here as well as info on the company and its principals. Company also has a revenue stream from production and sale of protein reagents (in 26 countries?). Seems to have this niche to itself at the moment.
I've invested in it (small position) as its research interests me, but I'm not capable of assessing the science behind it. Is there anyone out there who has any knowledge of either this field or Stressgen's work in particular?
Thanks for any help you can offer.
-Andy Patton |
