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

To: Jon Koplik who wrote (2207)	12/24/1999 9:58:00 AM
From: Jongmans	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3576

WIRED article on line: wired.com martin

To: Jon Koplik who wrote (2207)	3/15/2000 11:16:00 AM
From: Jon Koplik	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3576

I believe Geron owns the "Dolly the sheep" company; thus -- all of the news yesterday about the cloned pigs should have mentioned Geron. Here is the link to that Wired magazine article that mentions that Geron bought Roslin Bio-Med. wired.com (The article is quite long. This is just the part that relates to Geron). ********************* As the chief scientific officer at Geron Corporation - one of the hottest biotech firms in the country - Calvin Harley is at the epicenter of this convergence. Harley has spent his entire adult life thinking about why people die. Now he occupies an office at Geron headquarters, a couple of buildings near Highway 101 in Menlo Park, California, where he continues to think about death and how to prevent it. Harley is taking a holistic approach to the aging issue. Rather than focusing on individual aging genes or groups of genes, researchers at Geron are addressing other aging mechanisms, specifically telomeres and telomerase, the enzyme that keeps telomeres intact. First proposed by a Russian theoretician in the 1970s, the telomere theory of cell aging postulates that these small structures of repeated DNA bases at the ends of chromosomes behave a bit like pencils in a sharpener. Each time a cell divides, the theory goes, a little more telomere data gets shaved off, until the telomeres become so short that the cell can no longer divide. Cells then become senescent - not quite dying, but not dividing either - simply idling and pouring toxic wastes into surrounding tissues. Telomeres act as an aging clock, the theory says, but telomerase can prevent them from shortening, thereby making cells immortal. Geron's immediate commercial goal is to use telomere research in the detection and treatment of cancer. Most tumor cells, which divide indefinitely, produce telomerase. Locating telomerase-rich sites might be a way to locate developing cancers. Switching telomerase off through gene therapy might stop cancer from growing. Harley is slight, fit, balding, intense, and reticent - a classic science guy. He works in labs stuffed to the ceiling with beakers, bottles, flasks, test tubes, chemicals, incubators, and gene sequencers. Among the sparse decorations in his office is a framed poster of Salvador Dal's The Persistence of Memory. The artist's melting clocks, Harley explains, remind him of "the flexibility of time and possibly being able to manipulate the clock. It obviously has some significance to me and what I do in science." Harley thinks that research is gaining on the secrets of aging, secrets he has wanted to unlock since his high school days in Ontario, Canada, when he puzzled over a paradox: How can an 80-year-old man use 80-year-old DNA in 80-year-old cells to father a baby whose cells are fresh as a daisy? The answer, Harley thinks, lies in telomeres and telomerase. New research by Geron and others shows that telomerase can impart cell immortality - just as it does in an 80-year-old man's sperm, which produces telomerase naturally. And telomerase can do this in other cells - without, as some have feared, pushing those cells to become cancerous. Geron's scientists believe that controlling the production of telomerase will prove useful not only in treating cancer, but also in slowing down human aging. Normal, noncancerous cells with a switched-on telomerase gene don't turn cancerous but instead divide properly. They don't go senescent, either, nor do they degrade surrounding tissue. Keep the telomerase going, and you keep your cells young, which keeps tissues young, which keeps people young. "We are all born young," Harley says. "There is a capacity to have an immortal propagation of cells. The way we have evolved is to go from germline to germline, with our somas the dead-end carriers. But that is not inevitable." In other words, people don't have to die. Telomerase's ability to immortalize cells was a factor in Geron's decision last May to purchase Roslin Bio-Med - the people who brought us Dolly the sheep - thereby expanding into the other alluring branch of life-extension science: stem cells. Pluripotent stem cells may be the most promising avenue in longevity research because they can become any kind of tissue in the body. The ability to direct these cells' development and make them genetically identical to any patient's cells through cloning technology is leading to an era in which labs will custom-produce tissues and entire organs for transplantation - without fear of rejection. The 80-year-old man in Harley's example can help create a baby not only because his sperm is kept immortal with telomerase but because a sperm cell's DNA gets reprogrammed after it joins an egg. The DNA is told to start over. The same process occurs in nuclear transfer, the technique that spawned Dolly.