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Biotech / Medical : Unquoted Biotechs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: scaram(o)uche who wrote (69)	9/2/2003 9:29:16 AM
From: nigel bates	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 253

Dow and Avidex Agree to Develop Biotargeted Radiopharmaceuticals Based on mTCR Technology Tuesday September 2, 9:20 am ET Agreement applies ChelaMed services to enhance Avidex's Monoclonal T Cell Receptors MIDLAND, Mich., Sept. 2 /PRNewswire/ -- Avidex Limited and The Dow Chemical Company will collaborate to create biotargeted radiopharmaceuticals for cancer treatment by applying Dow's technology to Avidex's monoclonal T cell receptors (mTCRs), the companies announced today. Under the agreement, proprietary chelation technology and other capabilities, provided through ChelaMed(SM) radiopharmaceutical services from Dow, will be used to attach a therapeutic radioisotope to a targeted mTCR. The first effort will focus on Avidex's mTCR product, EsoDex(TM) to further enhance the targeted radiopharmaceutical for treatment of lung and bladder cancer. EsoDex targets the NY-ESO antigen, a very specific marker of cancer cells. "We are excited about using Dow's capabilities in chelation, conjugation, process and radiochemistry to enable Avidex to develop novel radiopharmaceuticals," said Dow's Mark Cassidy, PhD, Director, Pharmaceutical Technologies. "Biotargeted radiopharmaceuticals can potentially increase therapeutic options, raise effectiveness and reduce side effects to improve quality of life for patients with cancer and other diseases." Commenting on the agreement, Neill Moray MacKenzie, Avidex's Chief Business Officer, said: "We are extremely pleased to be working with this very well respected and established company. We believe that Dow's technology is a perfect complement to Avidex's emerging mTCRs. This agreement marks a very significant step in the development of our mTCR products as cancer targeting agents." Although NY-ESO is a very specific tumour associated antigen, it is an internal antigen, and therefore would not be detected by a therapeutic monoclonal antibody. EsoDex, from Avidex, however, is designed to specifically bind the fragments of the NY-ESO antigen that are presented on the surface of tumour cells by HLA class I molecules. Using the Dow chelator to attach a radionuclide (such as yttrium-90 or lutetium-177) as a payload to the NY-ESO-specific mTCR will enable targeted delivery of such cytotoxic agents. EsoDex is indicated for the treatment of cancers, such as lung and bladder cancers, that express the NY-ESO cancer-specific antigen. The NY-ESO cancer-specific antigen was originally discovered by the Ludwig Institute, New York. The agreement provides for additional future application of technologies and capabilities from ChelaMed radiopharmaceutical services to other cancer- specific mTCRs being developed by Avidex...

To: scaram(o)uche who wrote (69)	1/26/2004 8:47:45 PM
From: tuck	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 253

>>Published online before print January 26, 2004 Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 10.1073/pnas.0308221100 Cell Biology Method for analyzing signaling networks in complex cellular systems Ivan Plavec , Oksana Sirenko , Sylvie Privat , Yuker Wang , Maya Dajee , Jennifer Melrose , Brian Nakao , Evangelos Hytopoulos , Ellen L. Berg , and Eugene C. Butcher Bioseek, Inc., Burlingame, CA 94010; and Laboratory of Immunology and Vascular Biology, Department of Pathology, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA 94305 Communicated by Leroy Hood, Institute for Systems Biology, Seattle, WA, December 10, 2003 (received for review September 25, 2003) Now that the human genome has been sequenced, the challenge of assigning function to human genes has become acute. Existing approaches using microarrays or proteomics frequently generate very large volumes of data not directly related to biological function, making interpretation difficult. Here, we describe a technique for integrative systems biology in which: (i) primary cells are cultured under biologically meaningful conditions; (ii) a limited number of biologically meaningful readouts are measured; and (iii) the results obtained under several different conditions are combined for analysis. Studies of human endothelial cells overexpressing different signaling molecules under multiple inflammatory conditions show that this system can capture a remarkable range of functions by a relatively small number of simple measurements. In particular, measurement of seven different protein levels by ELISA under four different conditions is capable of reconstructing pathway associations of 25 different proteins representing four known signaling pathways, implicating additional participants in the NF-B or RAS/mitogen-activated protein kinase pathways and defining additional interactions between these pathways.<< Cheers, Tuck