GMED....possible cancer break-through boston.com
2-23-99
''The beauty of this approach is that it's so clean,'' said Wang Min, a senior scientist at Gene Medicine Inc., a Houston biotech company. ''You just put the endostatin gene in, and the body makes the pure protein - no contamination,'' he said.
The gene, the DNA blueprint for endostatin, was injected into the muscles of mice that had received transplants a week previously of lung or kidney cancer cells. Once a week for two weeks, the mice got the endostatin injections. Min said that the tumors in the treated mice grew much more slowly than in untreated mice, so that their tumors were 60 to 70 percent smaller, and they had six times fewer metastases, cancer that spread from the primary tumor.
Other scientists have used gene therapy to put endostatin genes into animals' bodies to combat tumors. But in those previous experiments, the endostatin DNA was carried into the animals' cells with a crippled virus. In Min's research, the endostatin gene was spliced into a simple DNA ring, which is less likely to cause adverse reactions, he said. And he said the DNA carriers are simple and cheap to make. |
