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

To: Biomaven who wrote (1459)	8/24/2000 11:21:56 AM
From: scaram(o)uche	Respond to of 52153

A few comments..... 1. The review from Beverly and collaborators starts with this...... "Immune responses against foreign antigens are initiated and controlled by dendritic cells (DCs)." Twenty years ago, it may have read...."Immune responses against foreign antigens are initiated by macrophages and controlled by helper T cells." Nobody would have blinked. My point? The immune response has a distinct mechanism, but our understanding of it evolves. 2. Note that Beverly et al. are concerned with the pathogenesis of autoimmune disease, but do not address the (potential) issue of danger re. passive immunization. 3. I would prefer, if I were bearing a metastatic Ca, to receive a "subunit" vaccine, rather than a vaccine that is derived from whole cells. Zinkernagel et al. are saying that even a subunit vaccine can be dangerous. There are two universal truths here: (1) in general, it is advisable to avoid getting cancer, and (2) 99% of immunology-related cancer research is bull. However, I am enthusiastic that dendritic cell vaccination, using purified protein "antigens", falls in the 1%. That doesn't mean that the observations of Zinkernagel et al. should be ignored.