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Strategies & Market Trends : YEEHAW CANDIDATES -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Metcalf who wrote (14794)	1/26/2006 12:55:08 AM
From: Jibacoa	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 23958

John, I am not too concerned about it going ex-dividend. The main concern is the pending 2Qs results. The stock seems overbought at present levels and will need good reports or some other good news in order to keep its present momentum

To: John Metcalf who wrote (14794)	1/26/2006 7:59:48 PM
From: Galirayo	Respond to of 23958

[H5N1] John .. What do you think of this News ?? Any Stocks come to mind? HELEN BRANSWELL 2 hours, 38 minutes ago TORONTO (CP) - U.S. researchers have identified a feature of one of the internal genes of avian influenza viruses that may help explain the remarkable virulence of the H5N1 virus as well as the one that triggered the 1918 Spanish flu. ADVERTISEMENT Their as-yet unproved hypothesis comes from early analysis of the genetic structures of a vast array of avian flu viruses which the team has sequenced in part or in whole. The product of their massive sequencing effort, which is being placed in public access databases, should prove to be a goldmine for flu researchers everywhere. That's because adding the full genetic codes of nearly 170 avian flu viruses and 2,200 individual avian influenza genes to those databases virtually doubles the amount of genetic sequence data on avian flu viruses available to the global scientific community. "What we've offering our colleagues in the flu business is to now mine that data themselves and to conduct experiments that are suggested by our results," said Clayton Naeve, senior author on an article outlining the work, published Thursday in the journal Science. An initial analysis of the viral sequencing performed by Naeve and his co-authors from St. Jude Children's Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., identified a sort of tag on the end of the non-structural, or NS1, protein inside avian viruses that may help explain the high death toll in people who become infected with the H5N1 virus. The virus has claimed the lives of roughly half of the people known to have become infected since the current outbreak began in Asia in late 2003. The NS1 protein is known to block the production of interferon, a protein the immune system generates to help it fight viral infections. The NS1 proteins from avian viruses differed from those of human viruses, containing this special motif or tag that allows the avian NS1 protein to latch on to proteins in human cells. The H5N1 virus and the H1N1 virus, which caused the 1918 pandemic, have the bird motif. The viruses that caused the milder pandemics of 1957 and 1968 had a human motif on their NS1 proteins, the team reported. That feature of avian viruses may contribute to the severity of disease some avian viruses provoke in people, the scientists theorize. But proving that would require lab work which has not yet been done. And other factors must be at play as well, given that some avian viruses have been shown to cause very mild disease in humans. The H7N3 virus behind British Columbia's 2004 avian flu outbreak is an example. "These traits - virulence, transmissibility from human to human - all of these things are multigenic," said Naeve, director of the Hartwell Center for Bioinformatics and Biotechnology at the hospital. "They're definitely going to require (involvement of) multiple genes." Scientists unrelated to the project found the discovery of interest. "Since . . . the major function of this protein is to regulate the host response (to infection), it makes a lot of sense that this protein is involved in virulence," said Adolfo Garcia-Sastre, a microbiologist at the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine in New York. "The role that this sequence plays in virulence in different hosts certainly requires further investigation, but the results are highly suggestive of an important role." Earl Brown, a virologist from the University of Ottawa, said the NS1 protein is known to interact with a lot of proteins in the cells flu viruses invade. "And it could be that those other protein interactions are more important than this, but this is a prerequisite," he hypothesized. Brown, who specializes in the evolution of virulence in flu viruses, said the protein is also known to be involved in triggering what's called a cytokine storm, a hyper-response of the immune system that can be more damaging than the invader it sets out to quell. This phenomenon has been observed in many of the human cases of H5N1 infection. The viruses Naeve's team sequenced were drawn from a collection of nearly 11,000 flu isolates amassed over decades by renowned flu researcher Dr. Robert Webster of St. Jude's. Many of the 7,000 or so avian viruses in the collection were acquired by the flu guru in repeated samplings of wild ducks in Alberta. Naeve said the viruses represent a broad spectrum of the avian flu subtypes. About 30 or so are H5 viruses; some of those are H5N1 viruses from Asia. "It's a genomic survey in a sense," he said. Until now, remarkably little sequence data on avian flu viruses has been in the public domain. And what sequencing information has existed has often been partial, generally focusing on the surface proteins hemagglutinin (H) and neuraminidase (N), which are thought to be the most important genes in terms of influenza's ability to infect, replicate and spread. While the roles of the six other flu genes are generally less well understood, scientists believe the constellation of genes in an individual virus - or changes to them - dictate whether it can jump from birds to humans or will trigger mild or severe illness. Brown, who will be among those mining this newly released data, nonetheless had mixed feelings about the release. He and other scientists who aren't affiliated with large, well-financed and well-connected institutions have long been frustrated by how much of these data are held beyond their reach. "This is long overdue and they're a bit lazy not to have done it earlier, really," he said.