<<All Cistron has is a POTENTIAL adjuvant. They have only results in rats that we know of. There are a lot of other adjuvants out there.>>
These are good points/concerns. Cistron's most recent IL-1b adjuvant studies with a flu vaccine supposedly involved animals other than rats. These results haven't been released publicly, but I suspect they'll be published and/or presented this fall similar to last year's results. Since Cistron was able to attract a partner as renowned as Pasteur Merieux Connaught, I'm assuming Cistron's current data supports the strongly positive data we saw last year.
Yup, there's good competition for vaccine adjuvants as shown by any number of posts on this thread, and vaccine technology is certainly a hot field. Fortunately, there's also quite a bit of independent research showing that IL-1b is potentially an effective adjuvant/immunostimulator for both infectious disease and cancer applications. I've listed several representative abstracts below.
<<A cytokine as an adjuvant without side effects is incredible! This whole thing will be dumped in a minute if side effects show up later.>>
The IL-1b safety issue has been addressed over the years. The following abstract seems to be one of the standard references describing a "safe" and active IL-1b fragment known as 163-171:
Vaccine 1993;11(5):594-595
Cytokines as vaccine adjuvants: interleukin 1 and its synthetic peptide 163-171.
Tagliabue A, Boraschi D
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
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I just found a current abstract describing analogs of 163-171:
Immunopharmacology 1998 Jan;38(3):237-245
Immunomodulating activity of analogs of noninflammatory fragment 163-171 of human interleukin-1beta.
Bajpai K, Singh VK, Sharan R, Yadav VS, Haq W, Mathur KB, Agarwal SS
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
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<<Why do you expect so much from IL1?>>
Because of Cistron research with a flu vaccine and independent research involving IL-1b in cancer vaccines delivered both as an adjuvant and using DNA techniques. Here are a few more representative abstracts:
J Immunol 1996 Dec 15;157(12):5503-5511
A nine-amino acid peptide from IL-1beta augments antitumor immune responses induced by protein and DNA vaccines.
Hakim I, Levy S, Levy R
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
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Vaccine 1997 Oct;15(15):1687-1696
DNA vaccination with cytokine fusion constructs biases the immune response to ovalbumin.
Maecker HT, Umetsu DT, DeKruyff RH, Levy S
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
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Cancer Res 1990 Feb 15;50(4):1212-1215
Interleukin 1 as an adjuvant for active specific immunotherapy in a murine tumor model.
McCune CS, Marquis DM
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
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Most importantly from a Cistron investment perspective (i.e., to the best of my knowledge - please verify), Cistron has rights to these IL-1b fragments and applications.
Rudy |
