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Biotech / Medical : Monsanto Co. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dan Spillane who wrote (2303)	7/20/1999 3:56:00 AM
From: sim1	Read Replies (5) \| Respond to of 2539

Doctors told of new heart failure treatment (Heard also on NPR) WASHINGTON, July 19 (Reuters) - Adding a drug known as Aldactone to the cocktail now usually given to heart failure patients can reduce the death rate by 30 percent, researchers said on Monday. The findings have such profound implications that the New England Journal of Medicine, which will publish the study in September, released the articles early on its Web site at nejm.com. Heart failure, in which the heart fails to pump vigorously enough, is a serious problem, with a 12 percent death rate per year. Half of all heart failure patients die within five years. An estimated 20 million people around the world, 4.7 million in the United States, suffer from heart failure and 250,000 Americans die from it each year, according to the American Heart Association. Standard treatment is diuretics, which lower blood pressure by forcing excess water from the body, and ACE inhibitors, which also help lower blood pressure. Recent studies have found that adding an older class of drugs, known as beta-blockers, helps as well. Dr. Bertram Pitt of the University of Michigan School of Medicine said it might be desirable to add a fourth drug. In November 1998 he told a meeting of the American Heart Association that giving Aldactone to heart failure patients reduced the death rate by 27 percent. His final results, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, show a decreased death rate of 30 percent. Aldactone, sold by Searle, Monsanto Corp.'s (NYSE:MTC - news) pharmaceutical division, is known generically as spironolactone. It is in a class of drugs known as aldosterone agonists, which are prescribed for a condition known as primary hyperaldosteronism, the edema or swelling associated with heart failure and cirrhosis of the liver. It is not approved for use in treating heart failure. Pitt tested 1,663 patients with severe heart failure who had systolic left ventricular dysfunction. They got a variety of drugs and half the group also got Aldactone or a placebo. Pitt said 386, or 46 percent, of the placebo patients died while 284, or 35 percent, of the group that got Aldactone died. ''Not only was combination therapy with Aldactone and ACE inhibitors well tolerated by patients in the most severe stages of heart failure, but the decrease in cardiac death and hospitalization was dramatic,'' he said in a statement. ''These findings suggest that the gold standard treatment for severe heart failure should include an aldosterone receptor antagonist,'' he said.

To: Dan Spillane who wrote (2303)	7/20/1999 3:04:00 PM
From: Anthony Wong	Respond to of 2539

Monsanto Co. Reiterated 'Buy' at Parker Hunter Bloomberg News July 20, 1999, 9:06 a.m. ET Princeton, New Jersey, July 20 (Bloomberg Data) -- Monsanto Co. (MTC US) was reiterated ''buy'' by analyst Richard J. Sporrer at Parker Hunter Incorporated. The 12 to 18-month target price is $ 60 per share.

To: Dan Spillane who wrote (2303)	7/20/1999 5:08:00 PM
From: Anthony Wong	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2539

Gene Splicing: How to create a life without sex U.S. News July 26, 1999 The U.S. government maintains that genetically modified crops are basically the same as traditional ones, not exotic new life forms. Activists say they represent unprecedented attempts to interfere with Mother Nature. The truth lies somewhere in between. Like all living things, crop plants vary from one individual to another; some are taller, greener, or tastier than others, for example. These unique characteristics are determined by a plant's genes, individual snippets of DNA, the giant molecule that carries all of an organism's hereditary information. For decades, plant breeders have been systematically manipulating the genetic makeup of crops, selecting individuals that perform well–those that are high yielding or pest resistant, for instance–and crossing them with other stellar specimens. But because this process is random and imprecise, it can take more than 15 years to produce a commercially valuable new variety. Conventional breeding also has limits: Breeders can only cross a plant with a closely related one. In the early 1980s, several research groups, including a team of Monsanto scientists led by Ernest Jaworski, overcame this barrier when they engineered the first "transgenic" plant–a petunia containing a bacterial gene–launching the age of agricultural biotechnology. To accomplish this feat, the researchers harnessed the power of another bacterium, Agrobacterium tumefaciens, that causes minor disease in many plant species by injecting its own DNA into the plant's cells. The scientists snipped out Agrobacterium's disease-causing genes, replaced them with genes they wished to introduce into the plant, and then let the bacterium ferry these foreign genes into the plant's cells. Still widely used today, this method has been supplemented with other techniques–such as a DNA "gun" that shoots genes directly into plant cells–for plants that Agrobacterium will not infect. Gene-splicing technology roughly halves the time it takes to develop a new variety. It also means fewer limits on what kind of DNA scientists can use to improve crop plants. So far, for example, they have inserted genes from trees, bacteria, chickens, and even flounder into corn, cotton, soybeans, tomatoes, potatoes, and other plants. Yet the variety of commercially available gene-spliced crops remains low. Most products on the market now have been engineered either to produce their own insecticide (courtesy of a bacterial gene) or to tolerate widely used herbicides, such as Monsanto's Roundup. The result of single-gene transfers, these traits have cut production costs–but they have limited effectiveness. To alter more complex traits such as growth rate and drought resistance, scientists must still learn how to manipulate entire suites of genes, many of which remain undiscovered. usnews.com:80/usnews/issue/990726/26dnab.htm

To: Dan Spillane who wrote (2303)	7/21/1999 12:46:00 AM
From: Anthony Wong	Respond to of 2539

U.S. Researchers Find Way To Change Plant Genes Updated 7:14 PM ET July 20, 1999 By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Researchers said Tuesday they developed a new way to genetically engineer plants -- one in which no foreign gene is inserted. Their method might be an answer to objections by groups which object to genetically engineered plants and fear they might be dangerous to people and the environment. "We may one day be able to quickly reduce caffeine in coffee beans or shorten the long-chain fatty acids found in plants like soybeans -- making the fat in them more heart-healthy like olive oil," Charles Arntzen, president of the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research Inc. at Cornell University in New York, said in a statement. Farmers have long used breeding methods to make genetic changes in their crops, and more recently short-cuts have been developed in laboratories -- including the use of foreign plant and animal genes. Tomatoes that ripen more slowly, grains with higher oil content and soybeans that resist herbicides have all resulted. But there have been objections to genetically engineered plants -- especially in Europe. And genetic engineering can be hit-and-miss. Arntzen and colleagues tried out a method designed to be more precise. Called chimeraplasty, it was developed by Newtown, Pennsylvania-based Kimeragen Inc. It acts as kind of a chemical instruction to the cell to alter the gene in the desired way by taking a stretch of DNA and combining it with RNA, which is the chemical that translates DNA's genetic code into a protein. This combination is the chimeraplast. The chimeraplast is designed to attach itself to the gene right where a change is needed. Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Arntzen's team said it used chimeraplasts to alter tobacco plants, while another team, at Pioneer Hi-Bred International Inc . in Johnston, Iowa, did it in corn plants. Chris Baszczynski, research coordinator at Pioneer Hi-Bred, which is due to be acquired by DuPont, said the new genetic sequence is chemically synthesized. "It doesn't use anything physically from the source gene," he said in a telephone interview. The chimera naturally finds its way to the gene that it is supposed to change, he said. "It aligns next to it and serves as a template so the existing gene can just read off that template and make the changes." The method will not work for the introduction of completely foreign genes, Baszczynski said. "You have to use the information that exists in the organism and then you design a molecule to make a change." Working with corn, they used the method to create plants that were resistant to herbicide, based on a natural mutation found in some corn strains. Arntzen's team did a similar experiment with tobacco, and both teams also tested plants that had a gene for fluorescence spliced in. "(That means) you can make a change to something that you have introduced, as well," Baszczynski said. "So if you did a transgenic-type approach and found out your gene didn't work for some reason you might be able to use this approach to fix it so that it does work." Baszczynski said the work was still highly experimental and very limited. "It has to be a single gene controlled type trait," he said. Traits such as resistance to drought are often controlled by a number of genes, so scientists would have to find a single gene that controls them all before such a trait could be altered using this approach. Kimeragen, a privately held company, has licensed the technique to Pioneer and to AgrEvo, a joint venture between Germany's Hoechst AG and Schering AG .