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To: Buckey who wrote (114050)	4/27/2003 11:19:24 PM
From: StocksDATsoar	Respond to of 150070

LONDON (April 22) - Scientists said Tuesday they have made a breakthrough in understanding how malaria develops resistance to drugs, a finding that could lead to the production of new medications to tackle the deadly disease. More than 1 million people die every year from the mosquito-borne infection. In some countries, the disease is now resistant to all affordable first-line drugs. The scientists, from Scotland and Thailand, said they had discovered how the parasite has been able to escape the effects of one of the main classes of anti-malaria drugs. The breakthrough focuses on a protein called DHFR, which the parasite produces to keep itself alive. The drug pyrimethamine should block this process but over the years has become less effective. The team said that using genetic engineering methods, they had produced large quantities of DHFR and identified its detailed crystalline structure. "These features provide possible approaches for the design of new drugs to overcome resistance," they wrote in an article published online by the journal Nature Structural Biology, a sister publication of the journal Nature. Professor Malcolm Walkinshaw, of Edinburgh University, told Reuters the team now had pictures showing the protein on its own, in the presence of the drug, and when it had mutated and become drug resistant. "We can use these high-resolution pictures as templates for a new generation of drugs," he said. "In terms of scientific insight it is a real breakthrough though in terms of new drugs on the market that is further down the line." 04/22/03 13:36 ET Copyright 2003 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content, including by framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters shall not be liable for any errors or delays in the content, or for any actions taken in reliance thereon. All active hyperlinks have been inserted by AOL.

To: Buckey who wrote (114050)	4/27/2003 11:20:41 PM
From: StocksDATsoar	Respond to of 150070

(April 22) - A gene therapy carried by a disemboweled virus cures diabetes in mice. The treatment lets the animals grow new insulin-making cells. The main problem in diabetes is that insulin-making islet cells in the pancreas die off. Earlier gene therapies inserted islet-cell genes into the pancreas. The cells grow, but they don't synch up with the body in quite the right way. Baylor University researchers Lawrence Chan, DSc, and colleagues took a different approach. Instead of using a gene that codes for islet cells, they used a gene that tells the liver to make its own new islet cells. They combined this gene with another gene that helps new islet cells to grow. To get the genes into the pancreas, Chan's team used a hollowed out virus. This "gutless" adenovirus, as they call it, doesn't have any disease-causing genes of its own. The researchers used a powerful drug to kill islet cells in lab mice. This gave the animals severe diabetes. They then treated the animals with the gene therapy. The animals grew new islet cells. The cells made insulin and other chemicals that control sugar metabolism. Unlike untreated mice, the treated animals did not die of diabetes. What happened? New, islet-like cells appeared in the animals. Chan isn't sure where they came from, but he suggests that the gene therapy may have caused them to grow from stem cells hiding in the liver. "The exciting part of it is that mice with diabetes are 'cured,'" Chan says in a news release. Chan is chief of Baylor's division of diabetes, endocrinology, and metabolism. The gutless virus used to deliver the gene has never been tested in humans. The extensive safety testing needed for this kind of gene therapy means that human studies won't begin right away. Chan and colleagues report the findings in the April 21 advance online edition of the journal Nature. SOURCES: Nature, April 21, 2003, advance online edition. News release, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston. © 2003 WebMD Inc. All rights reserved.