Hi Jill,
I don't know anything about Neutec. But antibodies as a rule usually work extremely well. The problem in infections is that they take a long time to produce, during which time the infection is rapidly growing. So, it is a time game, but once antibodies are being produced in enough quantity, they will do the job if things haven't gotten too far out of hand. As you point out with Anthrax, it is not yet understood how the initial immune response (innate immunity) is tailored to meet the magnitude of the threat, exactly how it orchestrates a longer term adaptive immune response (antibodies and such), and how it is turned off once it is no longer needed. But there has been tremendous progress towards these goals. And, that will be an area of intense interest (and eventually investment opportunities) for years to come.
Bacteria are an extremely clever and rapidly adaptible sort. The thing with glucocorticoids is just one of zillions of strategies the have developed to evade the immune system. They also interfere in numerous ways with how pathogen fragments are processed to develop subsequent defenses. One thing we can be sure of, bacteria are a lot quicker on their feet than we are. They had a several billion year head start in evolution for one thing. And they mutate like crazy and can fairly quickly develop new evasion strategies, whereas in mammals mutation is actively suppressed. Just considering these things, it makes you wonder how we ever could have survived. But our host defenses are phenomenal in their ability to defend against an extremely wide range of pathogens, and they have built-in the ability to thwart or neutralize almost all evasion strategies, even the ones that haven't even been created yet, and that's the key I think.
While I don't know anything about a "superantibody", it strikes me that the real problem is mounting an effective initial response that is appropriate for the infection. That is an area where there is tremendous interest, but no investor opportunities just yet that I am aware of.
RNAi companies include Sirna (RNAI) and Alnylam (ALNY). The latter is the best of the bunch IMHO. I have traded both successfully, but if I was going to invest in one longer term, that would without question be ALNY. The people involved in that company reads like a "Who's Who" of RNA interference research, and they have experience at startups also, so they are not naive egghead scientists.
T |
