NERX<----------- IF you didnt ...believe me yesterday ..than you are paying for it today...Curing CANCER in mice is no big deal.....Its like .....filling out an application...you need to do that before you can even try it ..on humans....,..
Curing cancer in laboratory animals is not new. There have been at least 1,000 such breakthroughs in mice alone, said Brian Vastag, a spokesman for the National Cancer Institute.
Tuesday, March 7, 2000, 12:00 a.m. Pacific
NeoRx cautious about cancer 'cure'
by Tyrone Beason
Seattle Times business reporter
Seattle biotech NeoRx took a crucial step yesterday in announcing that one of its experimental drugs "cured" three kinds of cancer in mice.
While it may take years to determine whether the company's Pretarget system cures cancers in humans - and even in animals - the news has sped the transformation of one of Wall Street's ugly ducklings into a golden goose for investors.
"This is still very early stage," warned Dayton Misfeldt, a stock analyst with Roth Capital Partners. "A cure in mice is a lot different than a cure in humans. We don't have any tangible products that are going to be coming out soon."
NeoRx plans to start formal testing in cancer patients in late fall at the earliest.
But as investors have shown with surges in Internet and, more recently, biotech stocks, promise can be as good as a product. They devoured NeoRx stock yesterday, pushing it up $32.938, or 151 percent, to $54.75 a share at the close, after it peaked at $70 a share during the day.
About 18 million of NeoRx's 21 million outstanding shares changed hands. On a normal day, that figure is closer to 500,000.
The company says its Pretarget cancer treatment - which involves separately injecting disease-fighting antibodies and radioactive molecules into the bloodstream - made breast, lung and colon tumors disappear in mice after just one treatment. To be considered a cure in animals, there can be no reoccurrence for at least a year.
A cure in humans, however, requires zero cancer growth for five years.
Curing cancer in laboratory animals is not new. There have been at least 1,000 such breakthroughs in mice alone, said Brian Vastag, a spokesman for the National Cancer Institute.
The institute recently awarded NeoRx a grant of up to $950,000 to study Pretarget in patients with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, or cancer of the system that carries white blood cells.
The word "cure" may be misleading, given the preliminary nature of the breast, lung and colon cancer findings, Vastag said.
"It's very early to start throwing that word around," he said. "It's almost like doing an experiment in a Petri dish where you control all the variables."
The human body is more complex, making it tougher to produce a drug that does what it's intended to do. Plus, there are some 200 known cancers, and each has to be handled differently.
NeoRx is taking a cautious approach to Pretarget.
It's looking for stronger cancer treatments rather than cures, Chief Executive Officer Paul Abrams said.
Finding cures, he said, is "a very, very lofty goal, and not one that would be required to make a useful product for patients."
NeoRx will focus much of its attention in the near term on the lymphoma research.
It has discovered that radiation, using the Pretarget method, can safely be delivered to lymphoma patients in much higher doses than conventional cancer treatments.
Unlike current treatments, the Pretarget treatment is delivered in separate injections, the first for the antibody and a subsequent one for small radioactive molecules. The two sets of molecules join temporarily at the site of the tumor to destroy it.
The tiny radioactive particles flush out of the body so quickly they have little time to damage healthy tissue.
Preclinical tests with Pretarget in seven lymphoma patients have resulted in three remissions with no significant side effects.
Pretarget is versatile and may be configured to fight a range of cancers, Abrams said.
The challenge is to find the right antibodies and the maximum safe dosage of radiation to fight specific diseases.
The potentially broad use is attractive to investors looking for companies with deep drug pipelines, Misfeldt said.
But NeoRx's 151 percent surge yesterday also can be viewed as a cautionary tale about the fickle world of biotech investing.
Maryland-based EntreMed grew sevenfold and then plummeted one week in 1998 after The New York Times reported test findings from a drug with similarly impressive tumor-fighting effects in mice. EntreMed continued to fall after its development partner, Bristol-Myers Squibb, abandoned the project because it didn't consider the drug a good prospect for human testing.
NeoRx lost corporate partner Janssen Pharmaceutica, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, in 1998 when a cancer antibody failed to produce hoped-for results in tests using the Pretarget system.
The company's stock slumped to $1 a share, a 52-week low, in April, but climbed by year's end as NeoRx announced favorable results on other drugs. |
