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Biotech / Medical : GZMO

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To: Spekulatius who wrote (298)	10/8/2000 12:33:02 PM
From: Extra Pale	Read Replies (1) of 438

More on GZMO Vaccines: By Ronald Garren, M.D. October 5, 2000 Biotech Insight News Alert: Genzyme Molecular Oncology Biotechs are holding up relatively well in this down market—a good sign that the flight to safety has not hurt this sector very much. I think this is due to the realization that biotech remains a sector with good intellectual property right protection and difficult barriers to entry, such as capital requirements and long clinical trial periods (for the drug oriented stocks). A recent announcement by Genzyme Molecular Oncology (GZMO) is of interest. They have just started phase 1 / 2 studies using their proprietary vaccine for melanoma and kidney cancer. What I really like is that earlier studies reported this year in Nature Medicine from Germany using the same technology showed absolutely outstanding results in patients with far advanced renal cancers. Of all the individualized autologous vaccine approaches (i.e. vaccines made from a patients own cancer cells)—this one strikes me as the most promising. Granted, conceptually the market would be better for a generic vaccine (one size fits all) since it’s so much simpler to make and I certainly include companies like Biomira and others in my portfolio. To talk a little science—what I like about GZMO’s approach is that they fuse the patient’s cancer cells with someone else’s dendritic cells (allogeneic dendritic cells) and then radiate the combined cells (hybridoma) to form the vaccine. Dendritic cells are the most important antigen-presenting cells (APCs) in the body and they serve as a kind of chaperone introducing antigens to the immune system. This is a necessary first step in initiating an immune response. By fusing the cancer cell to the dendritic cell GZMO has combined antigen production and presentation in one package—and by using an allogeneic dendritic source they probably have made the whole package even more immunogenic. The expectation is that generating a strong immune response will help the body destroy the cancer. GZMO holds the rights to this technology and although they are behind other dendritic cell based therapies in the clinical trial arena—their approach seems the most exciting (of course that is my editorial opinion). Other companies such as Dendreon are pursuing the use of dendritic cells—usually they are derived from the patient and then loaded ex-vivo with peptide antigens. The loaded cells are then injected back into the patient forming the basis for a vaccine therapy. However, many of these approaches make use of a limited number of antigens and many of the antigens are generic—this limits the immune response repertoire. GZMO has some other exciting things going for it including the SAGE technology for identifying genes preferentially expressed in cancer or other diseased states. (For subscribers, see- Biotech Insight archives for more info on GZMO) . . . Ronald Garren, M.D.

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