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Biotech / Medical : Ciphergen Biosystems(CIPH): -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tuck who wrote (106)	4/7/2003 5:35:05 PM
From: tuck	Respond to of 510

Given that CIPH got whacked a bit today, this AACR news may give it a bounce, though, of course, the abstracts have been out for a month. Interesting to see what happens to companies presenting results through their own channels that had planned on presenting at the canceled meeting. Geron had a wild day with that strategy. We might get others, as I found quite number of CIPH related abstracts, for the most part offering incremental improvements in diagnostic specificity and sensitivity by combining the fingerprinting approach with the current popular marker. Not as groundbreaking as the stuff presented last year, but continued validation and interest. >>FREMONT, Calif., April 7 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Ciphergen Biosystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: CIPH - News) announced today that Dr. Lin Ji from the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center published work in the proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research's 2003 Meeting, describing a study in which gene and protein expression profiling were combined to reveal unique cellular targets and putative signaling pathways of the tumor suppressor gene FHIT in lung cancer. The AACR cancelled its annual meeting, scheduled for April 5-9 in Toronto, Canada, as a result of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak. The M. D. Anderson group, headed by Dr. Jack Roth (with collaborators Drs. John Minna and Skip Garner from University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center), used complementary gene and protein expression profiling tools. Affymetrix's GeneChip technology and Ciphergen's ProteinChip technology were used to quantitatively monitor cellular changes in gene and protein expression and discover the molecular targets of the novel FHIT TSG in non-small cell lung carcinoma (NSCLC) cells. About 200 genes differentially and specifically expressed in Ad-FHIT-transduced cells were identified. The gene expression data were further compared and validated with the available public expression data on lung and certain other cancers. A protein expression profiling analysis using Ciphergen's SELDI ProteinChip technology was simultaneously performed to analyze differentially expressed protein species. About 40 cellular targets that are either differentially up- or down-regulated by FHIT tumor suppressing activities in these Ad-FHIT-transduced NSCLC cells were both discovered and sequence identified using Ciphergen's ProteinChip Biomarker System. More than 70% of the differentially expressed proteins identified correlated directly as gene products hypothesized by the DNA expression data. A comparative analysis of the gene and protein expression profiling revealed several unique cellular targets and signaling pathways involved in FHIT tumor suppressing activity, including the significantly down-regulated expression of proteins in the Ras/Rho GTPase super-family, the cytoskeleton- and tubulin-forming components, and the growth factors, and the up-regulated protein mediators in cell death and apoptosis pathways. The down-regulated expression of several Rho GTPases including RAN, Rab, Rac, Rap, and Ral were further confirmed by Western blot analysis. These findings clearly linked FHIT tumor suppressing function to the regulation of cell proliferation and apoptosis. William Rich, President and CEO of Ciphergen, stated, "This rigorously conducted study confirms that protein expression profiling is highly complementary to gene expression profiling alone. We are hopeful that the description of the benefits of employing these two approaches together will encourage other researchers to more widely adopt this practice." Dr. Jack A. Roth, Chairman of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery at M. D. Anderson, commented, "As Dr. Ji's poster states, our data demonstrated that the complementary gene and protein expression technology is a powerful tool for generation of hypothesis and for identification of cellular targets and signaling pathways mediated by a specific gene product in a complex biological network."<< snip Cheers, Tuck