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

To: jeffbas who wrote (59)	8/20/1999 12:40:00 AM
From: scaram(o)uche	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 438

Jeff: Really hard to say..... what if you tried this and had severe "allergic" responses in humans? It would be worthless. The use of dendritic cells to make a vaccine effective is hot. If you find and review a home page for Dendreon, you may get a better idea. It would be a patient-specific therapy, and that's a step that biologicals has tried to take previously (BioTherapeutics and other companies that are no longer with us). In the 70s and 80s, we were looking for molecules (antigens) that were specific for tumors. If they exist, they are not very immunogenic and they're hard to find. Therefore, immunotherapy in the 90s was focused on "self" antigens, molecules that are found on normal tissues on the general population, but where expression is relatively elevated and/or restricted to cancer cells. PSA and CEA are examples. Such molecules might be a decent target for immunotherapy, as we (the patients) may be able to survive an autoimmune attack on our normal cells in the context of an effective immune response on a tumor. Obviously, you don't want to pick an antigen that is on the surface of all liver cells, and it's very difficult to predict what the side effects may be. This is one half of the "kitchen sink" approach to cancer at GZMO..... they're throwing everything at melanoma. The other half is an attempt to engineer the human effector cells so that they have increased levels of tumor-specific "killer T cells". First time that I've been enthused about immunotherapy for cancer is 25 years.