Actually..... one of our routine contributors does understand that stuff.
You recently asked me, somewhere, about Antigenics and Stressgen.
It doesn't make much sense to me, but I haven't looked closely enough. I have LOOSELY followed HSPs for years, ever since their assn. with MHC molecules that lack "invariant chain" was first described.
Same question as always, same question that has been there since about 1970....... sure, experimental cancers -- induced tumors -- are immunogenic. But what does a HSP grab onto for a spontaneous neoplasm? What it the "antigen"?
There are many dogmatic answers that spill out of many mouths. But there's little or no sound science, except that connected to rare virus-induced cancers (such as the E7/HPV example in the story that you referenced) and clonally distributed "idiotypes" on lymphoid tumors.
The observation, in most good labs to date...... if you attempt to immunize against a spontaneous, syngeneic mouse or rat carcinoma of recent origin, you will fail. That flies right in the face of what Srivastava et al. are trying to do. That's a given cancer, not a search for an "across the board antigen associated with a given histology".
I've been saying, for 23 years, that this sort of dogma is crap. I've been correct. The dogma is still out there.
Stressgen..... I don't understand why they would use a recombinant hybrid, rather than an appropriately loaded (noncovalent) peptide.
Antigenics.... another patient-specific therapy. One has tons of time to join the romp if they're successful, and lots of downside potential in the interim. IMO.
Next breath..... let's hope it works!
Stressgen was planning to move to San Diego. Did that plan get trashed? |
