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Biotech / Medical : IMNR - Immune Response -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: margie who wrote (1393)	7/29/1999 4:58:00 PM
From: Alan Bershtein	Respond to of 1510

Margie, I just got off the phone with an IR rep at Immune Response. The Yahoo poster you mentioned is 100% correct. It is IMUR who is investigating merger possibilities, not IMNR. Dennis J, It's a small world. Good to see you are also holding IMNR. Hope you survived this brutal day. --Alan

To: margie who wrote (1393)	8/11/1999 6:14:00 PM
From: gao seng	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1510

retrovirus news on hmtv - cancer vaccine. Wednesday, August 11, 1999 Cancer virus clue to vaccine hope ANALYSIS by DEBORAH SMITH The discovery of a virus linked to breast cancer raises many of the same issues that the discovery of breast cancer genes did five years ago. This is because the virus is much more like a gene than the viruses we are familiar with, like influenza, that jump from people to people. It hides silently, a tiny bit of DNA, inside a person's chromosomes, and is passed down from generation to generation. After the first gene which predisposes women to breast cancer, known as BRCA1, was discovered in 1994, tests for it were quickly developed. But there was not enough information to tell women who tested positive how great a cancer risk they faced. Major studies are now under way to answer the question definitively, concentrating on women with a family history of the disease. The virus, however, is expected to play more of a role in the 95 per cent of breast cancer cases that appear in women with no family history. Researchers will need to test many people, with and without cancer, to find out how common the virus is, and indeed, whether it does cause cancer, and in how many people. A very similar virus was discovered in mice in 1942, and it is known that different strains carry different risks of cancer developing. The importance of different strains of the human virus will need to be determined, before tests are of much value. In mice it is known that female hormone levels can switch the virus on. But there are other environmental factors likely to be involved in activation of the virus, the New Orleans researchers say. The virus may also interact somehow with the breast cancer predisposition genes. The virus is in the same class as the AIDS virus, known as retroviruses, which is seen as potentially helpful for the development of anti-viral drugs, because this approach has been so successful against HIV. Scientists have been looking for the virus for 50 years. Its discovery would raise an additional hope: that it might be possible to develop a vaccine that can prevent breast cancer. Professor Robert Garry conceded yesterday that the quest for an AIDS vaccine was going slowly. "But at least it [the breast cancer virus] gives us a target to go after," he said. smh.com.au Breakthrough: the virus that may cause breast cancer An earlier diagnosis would have been welcome ... breast cancer survivor Rosanna Martinello yesterday. Photograph by RICK STEVENS By DEBORAH SMITH and JULIE ROBOTHAM Scientists have identified a virus they believe causes breast cancer, raising the prospect that a vaccine could be developed against the disease. The discovery - the first to link an inherited virus with a major human cancer - was announced in Sydney yesterday at the 11th International Congress of Virology. Professor Robert Garry, a microbiologist at Tulane University Medical Centre in New Orleans, said the finding might be used to identify people at risk of developing the cancer, so early diagnosis and treatment could be instigated. "And if a vaccine could be developed ... we could even prevent [cancers] from occuring altogether," he said. The new human virus was almost identical to a virus which caused breast cancer in mice. The researchers found that more than 85 per cent of women with breast cancer had the human virus, compared with only 20 per cent of people without breast cancer. Dr Garry said while this did not prove the virus caused the disease, it was a very strong association. "It is almost inconceivable to me that it will not be responsible for some percentage of human breast cancers." The virus cannot be caught from someone else. It is incorporated in a person's genetic material, and is passed down from parent to child. Rosanna Martinello, who was diagnosed with breast cancer almost five years ago, when she was 33, would have welcomed any test that could have shown in her 20s that she was at risk. But the Haberfield woman, whose cancer has been successfully treated, is also worried the knew knowledge "could be used against the person with the virus" - through discrimination in the workplace or access to insurance. The director of the NSW Breast Cancer Institute, Professor John Boyages, described the discovery as "exciting", but said the research had only been conducted on 30 women and large numbers needed to be tested to determine its significance. Dr Garry said the virus in mice was discovered in 1942, but many researchers gave up trying to find a human link 20 years ago when they learned there were 50,000 viruses belonging to the same group, known as human endogenous retroviruses, that could be incorporated in a person's genetic material. It was like "looking for a needle in a haystack". But Dr Garry's team decided to try again because of advances in technology for identifying genetic sequences. They have confidently named the virus the human mammary tumour virus, HMTV. smh.com.au