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

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (14706)	12/16/2004 4:40:44 PM
From: scaram(o)uche	Respond to of 52153

would you mind moving on and infecting some other thread? thanks.

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (14706)	12/16/2004 8:56:12 PM
From: Henry Niman	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 52153

The engineered part was quoting the proposal to have congressional hearings which would cover both natural and engineered pandemic flu. For the isolates in Korea, the human virus came from a lab, which is why it could negatively impact Biotechnology because it may put a damper on research if it spreads from the pigs to humans (the general public has an aversion for lethal lab escapees). Influenza A recombines and re-assorts, and the isolates in Korea have done both naturally. If you wanted to make H5N1 into a bioweapon, you would just swap in a human receptor binding domain to get a virus with a 70% mortality rate that was easily transmissible from human to human. The virus in Korea looks remarkably like the virus in 1933. The isolates in Korea look like they escaped from a lab (and may be quite lethal), but don't appear to be engineered (which isn't necessary - they have broad tissue tropism (including neurological), are drug resistant, and kill mice as efficiently as the virus with its H swapped for the H from the 1918 pandemic strain).