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Biotech / Medical : Ligand (LGND) Breakout! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: medsunman who wrote (13965)	1/30/1998 3:05:00 PM
From: Henry Niman	Respond to of 32384

About all I can do in that regard, is address the wine changing hands. Andy should have just received his two bottles of McGuigan Brothers, The Black Label.

To: medsunman who wrote (13965)	1/30/1998 3:16:00 PM
From: Henry Niman	Respond to of 32384

Here's the AP report on the baldness gene: By Stephen Hart ABCNEWS.com Picture a future with no toupees and no razors, when a mere cream will raise hair on bald pates and another will prevent stubbly growth on chins and legs. Thanks to a Pakistani family with inherited baldness and a hairless strain of mutant mice, the future may not be so far off. A multi-national research team reports in the January 30 issue of the journal Science that they've discovered a gene that directly affects hair growth. "This is the first gene that's involved in regulating the hair cycle," says Columbia University scientist Angela M. Christiano, who did the research with colleagues in Pakistan, the United States and Britain. "Most people think of the (hair growth) cycle as being like a clock," she explains. Hairs grow from small sockets called follicles, which automatically go through their paces: After a period of hair growth, the cells rest. Then the hair falls out, triggering a new round of follicle activity. "Without passing through certain checkpoints, a hair follicle can't really reach the next phase" in the cycle, says Christiano. When the system bogs down, hair simply doesn't grow. . Christiano's hunt for the gene began with a Pakistani family among which four living men and seven living women were born with no eyebrows or eyelashes. Their head hair appeared normal at birth, but never regrew after a ritual shave at a week of age. None of these people ever grew armpit or pubic hair. Slippery Mutant The new gene triggers only the rare type of baldness that ran in this family. But all hair loss probably involves some genetic disruption of the hair growth cycle, perhaps in conjunction with hormonal or environmental factors. Male pattern baldness, the most common type, affects both men and women and causes some degree of hair loss in up to 80 percent of the population. At first, Christiano's team identified an area of a chromosome where they thought they'd find the gene responsible for the Pakistanis' baldness. But they drew a blank when they tried to match the data to a gene database. "We were desperate, actually," she says. To solve the mystery, they turned to a strain of mice called hairless. "The mice are born with baby hair that falls out," says Christiano, exactly what was happening in the Pakistani family. Other researchers had used the hairless strain to test cosmetics, but no one had thought to investigate their baldness. The gene that caused the mice to lose their hair turned out to lie in the same chromosomal region identified in the Pakistani family, and there Christiano finally found a small mutation in the human version of the mouse hairless gene. She thinks it may act as a control switch for hair growth. "At least this gene allows us to ask the question, `What turns it on and what does it then turn on?' " she says. "This is a very beautiful piece of work," comments David Schlessinger, chief of the Laboratory of Genetics at the National Institute on Aging, who called the study an excellent example of human genetic science. "It's an entry point toward the possibility of curing baldness or preventing it." Heads Up A method for delivering the gene may already lie at hand. In 1995, scientists at a California company called AntiCancer worked out a method for getting genes into hair follicles. They packaged the genes in small fatty droplets called liposomes and essentially rubbed them on the skin of mice. Some follicle cells took up the test genes, which actually worked to grow hair. Christiano sees no insurmountable barrier to developing hair growth or prevention products for humans based on this technology. "We already know that taking the gene down will cause hairlessness," she says. "It's just a question of turning the gene back on." Or you could do both-turn it off to grow hair on your head and on to stop hair growth on the face or legs. Schlessinger is more cautious. "It's a goal that can be worked for," he says. "It's imaginable, but at this point, I don't think it would be directly feasible." The next research step seems obvious, says Christiano: "Put the gene in a liposome and smear it on the backs of these mice and see if they grow hair. If they do, then I guess we'll be doing a clinical trial in Pakistan."

To: medsunman who wrote (13965)	1/30/1998 3:24:00 PM
From: Henry Niman	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 32384

medsunman, After reading the AP report, I realized that the baldness gene discovery may be more impotant to LGND than I thought. When I read about trying to use the gene to restore hair, I thought that the researchers were taking a rather narrow approach. Since there was a structural relationship between the hairless gene and the estrogen or androgen receptors, then related hormones could be just the right medicine. There have already been reports of topical applications of estrogens restoring hair in mice and they could be cross reacting with the hairless gene product (or another related zinc finger transcription factor). Thus the find may speed development of estrogens (or anti-androgens). As you know, LGND has extensive programs in both areas, and using the hairless gene product (receptor) as a screening vehicle, may yield some fast and exciting results.