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Biotech / Medical : Kosan BioSciences -- KOSN -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: keokalani'nui who wrote (18)	7/18/2001 8:21:18 PM
From: keokalani'nui	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 933

Kosan races Maxygen, Diversa to new drugs By Matthew Herper, Forbes.com, 06.28.00, 9:15 AM ET There's a big market for new antibiotics, because the old ones aren't working. As the current crop of antibiotics trudges on like a decimated army, scientists are searching for replacements. Kosan, a private company founded by Stanford University scientists, thinks it can make them by growing a new legion of drugs from the soil. And its efforts are attracting the attentions of two larger, more mainstream biotech companies: Maxygen maxy (nasdaq: maxy - news - people) and Diversadvsa (nasdaq: dvsa - news - people). The problem with antibiotics is that they have been overused, and the bacteria they battle have grown smarter in the past years. On June 12, the World Health Organization reported that this reduced the power of "once life-saving medicines to that of a sugar pill." Penicillin, the first antibiotic, could once defeat most cases of gonorrhea; now it can beat almost none of them. Stanford Professor Chaitan Khosla and his colleagues at Kosan believe they can use genetic engineering to literally sculpt a new antibiotic army from common soil, stocking it with medicines that disease-causing bacteria don't know how to conquer. Kosan could be on to a major advance in antibiotic production. In the past, antibiotics have, for the most part, been found, not made. Usually, they literally are summoned from the soil, where the organisms that produced them lived, into the factory, where scientists produce massive amounts of the new chemicals. Sometimes the chemicals taken from the soil can be altered slightly to make new drugs; but when this is done, it is done at random. Chemically altered antibiotics are typically thrown at the disease in a sort of trial-and-error process to see what works. But scientists never had the actual recipe used by the organism to make the antibiotic chemical. Kosan may change that. Kosan is using genetic engineering techniques to steal the blueprints that nature uses to make antibiotics. The company takes the genes from those organisms to map out the chemical pathways that lead to the antibiotic themselves. Then, in a process called combinatorial biosynthesis, they change the genes too, leading to new drugs. This is attracting the attention of San Diego-based Diversa and Redwood City, Calif.-based Maxygen, which are trying to use a similar technique to develop industrial chemicals and drugs. The two companies are very similar. Both get paid by other companies to develop new drugs and chemicals. Their respective approaches to finding new chemicals are also similar. Both try to imitate nature, and both are so far operating at a loss. Last quarter* Diversa reported a $6 million loss on revenue of $4 million, while Maxygen reported a loss of $5.6 on revenue of $5 million. Nature has developed antibiotics the same way it develops everything: through millions of years of trial and error. This is how evolution works. Small changes emerge through mutation, and the good changes, those that improve an organism's ability to survive, remain. Diversa and Maxygen have found ways to accelerate this process in the lab, and this has worked fairly well. Diversa has used this technique to develop a valuable enzyme used for cleaning oil wells, and Maxygen has developed enzymes used in industrial production and for the manufacture of other drugs. Diversa is also chasing drug compounds, looking for its own new antibiotics. "This field has been tainted with a lot of promises of finding new drugs, but the problem has been that we've had to establish a very good baseline with many large pieces of DNA," says Eric Mathur, Diversa's senior director of molecular biology. "It's been a difficult sell, and its been a learning curve to teach these companies what we're really offering." Maxygen is doing what larger companies often do: It's sitting back and waiting to see if tiny Kosan can really work antibiotic wizardry. "What we are doing in this area at the moment is nothing," says Russell Howard, chief executive of Maxygen. In order to make these drugs, "we would really form some kind of alliance with companies like Kosan." But the two companies are only beginning to find useful drugs, and Kosan's approach may be faster. Instead of simply imitating evolution, Kosan consciously reinvents nature's designs. And this may prove an incredibly efficient way to fill medical markets where there is a known need. When it comes to making new antibiotics, science may have found a way to improve on nature by knowing exactly where to go, and rushing to get there, rather than meandering along at nature's glacial pace.