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

To: squetch who wrote (15013)	2/13/1998 7:48:00 PM
From: Henry Niman	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 32384

Stan, I just read the "Beyond Tamoxifen" paper, and you should be feeling tingly.. The data was almost in the "too good to be true" category, especially the dose response curves as well as the observation that the in vivo results was better than would have been anticipated by the in vitro data. I certainly can see why LGND would get rolling on breast cancer big time. Targretin outperformed Tamoxifen in virtually every assay, and retinoids were really left in the dust (and it was interesting that the discovered or retinoids, Michael Sporn, was acknowledged for a critical review and he was also quoted in some of the follow up article by the wire services. Not only did Targretin cause a complete regression (primary tumor could no longer bee seen or palpated) in 72% of the animals, but those tumors that only partially regressed as well as those that remained, showed many signs of decreased malignancy, including growth rate. What I found most interesting were some of the explanations for the outstanding in vivo results. Unlike like xenografts (human clones put into nude, immunodefective, mice, the NMU tumors were heterogeneous and arose over time. They looked like human adenocarcinomas and they even have a mutation in the 12th codon of the ras gene (which is one of the most common alterations in human tumors, especially colon and bladder cancer). They also mentioned influencing paracrine signalling. Ligand would like to explore the ras connection further as well as more in vivo test (as in clinical trials including combination trials). Should be very exciting and I think that the response to the animal data will stimulate interest and focus resources on this difficult, but very approachable disease.