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

To: tuck who wrote (309)	12/31/2000 3:16:00 PM
From: Spekulatius	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1784

Sartorius and Biotest - Has anybody heard about Sartorius and Biotest or knows their products ? Both are German companies and went public in the 80's. Sartorius builds high precision scales and i remember that i have seen lots of them in university labs. Biotest makes test/diagnostic equipment for blood. I have seen one of their air testers (air hygene) in a trade magazine. Both might be reasonable tricklish and have shown strong revenue growth recently.

To: tuck who wrote (309)	12/31/2000 3:49:20 PM
From: scaram(o)uche	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1784

Actually..... one of our routine contributors does understand that stuff. You recently asked me, somewhere, about Antigenics and Stressgen. It doesn't make much sense to me, but I haven't looked closely enough. I have LOOSELY followed HSPs for years, ever since their assn. with MHC molecules that lack "invariant chain" was first described. Same question as always, same question that has been there since about 1970....... sure, experimental cancers -- induced tumors -- are immunogenic. But what does a HSP grab onto for a spontaneous neoplasm? What it the "antigen"? There are many dogmatic answers that spill out of many mouths. But there's little or no sound science, except that connected to rare virus-induced cancers (such as the E7/HPV example in the story that you referenced) and clonally distributed "idiotypes" on lymphoid tumors. The observation, in most good labs to date...... if you attempt to immunize against a spontaneous, syngeneic mouse or rat carcinoma of recent origin, you will fail. That flies right in the face of what Srivastava et al. are trying to do. That's a given cancer, not a search for an "across the board antigen associated with a given histology". I've been saying, for 23 years, that this sort of dogma is crap. I've been correct. The dogma is still out there. Stressgen..... I don't understand why they would use a recombinant hybrid, rather than an appropriately loaded (noncovalent) peptide. Antigenics.... another patient-specific therapy. One has tons of time to join the romp if they're successful, and lots of downside potential in the interim. IMO. Next breath..... let's hope it works! Stressgen was planning to move to San Diego. Did that plan get trashed?

To: tuck who wrote (309)	12/31/2000 5:35:59 PM
From: Pseudo Biologist	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1784

four-stranded beta-barrel topology; beta-sandwich architecture; steered Langevin dynamics Tuck, your link did not work for me, but I am guessing it points to a version of this abstract by Klimov & Thirumalai: ncbi.nlm.nih.gov (or something close to it). If so, then the full PNAS article is available free online: pnas.org Figure 1 has a schematic picture of the topology/architecture of the proteins studied in this work. As for "steered Langevin dynamics," this is a biased (steered) version of a technique the tries to impose some amount of random noise and viscosity over the trajectory (dynamics) of a system, in this case a protein unfolding or folding. The cool thing here is that this kind of stuff can be done in real life (not just in silico as in the paper); meaning stretching out individual protein molecules. Here is a free link to a mini-review of such work: jbc.org Last, while I find Thirumalai's work interesting, I do think the man on this line of work ought to be UCSF's Ken Dill (awfully nice guy as well): ucsf.edu Happy New Year and thanks for all your efforts, PB