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Biotech / Medical : Biotechnology Value Fund, L.P. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Spekulatius who wrote (2190)	12/14/2000 1:31:49 AM
From: scaram(o)uche	Respond to of 4974

>> is the chance of Histamine being effective against Hepatitis C much better? << Ralf: Data for HCV looks good, as presented by the company. It's all "phenomenology", IMO -- there is a plausible mechanism that has been floated. The data for melanoma now has largely gone poof, so how much phenomenon is actually there? Data looks very good. As presented by the company. It's like the chicken and the egg.... which came first, the data or the proposed mechanism? >> what is a NK cell? << Nobody knows. If someone tells you that he/she does know, then he(she)'s not much of a scientist. The best theory, at this time, is that they are lymphoid cells that are triggered to become cytotoxic when they don't recognize something. Ed Clark and I were actually the first to propose this mechanism, a wrinkle on that originally put on the table by Nobel laureate George Snell. Adv. Cancer Res. 1980;31:227-85 Genetic control of natural cytotoxicity and hybrid resistance. Clark EA, Harmon RC The best data that I've seen indicates that they are capable of killing cells that express a lower than normal concentration of class I major histocompatibility "antigens" on their surface. That is, they become activated when they sense the relative ABSENCE of a molecule. Exactly the opposite of how immunologists are trained to think. But, we knew that from the time that it was determined that they are the cell type that mediates a phenomenon called "hybrid resistance", a phenomenon that made no sense in the classical context of "immunology think". They've been studied for twenty years. We don't know what they do. Lots of guesses, some good ones. Rick