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Biotech / Medical : XOMA. Bull or Bear? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Robert K. who wrote (6423)	6/6/1998 9:48:00 AM
From: Robert K.	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 17367

Same old story. Someone working at St Marys Hospital>>>>>>>>>>> >> (I wonder how investors would have reacted to his timeline) FYI> Fleming was born to a Scottish farming family. He left home with his brother for London; . He became associated with St. Mary's Hospital, the youngest of London's teaching hospitals, and remained there for his entire career. He worked with Almroth Wright, a major advocate of vaccines who developed vaccines for many microbial diseases and was keenly interested in the immune system. Wright became head of the newly created "Inoculation Department" at St. Mary's, an essentially autonomous entity within the hospital. The Inoculation Department was financially self-supporting, on the basis of the vaccines they developed, sold, and treated patients with. During World War I, Fleming was one of Wright's primary assistants in a major effort to combat the rampant infections and septicemia in British soldiers' wounds. Physicians had only recently accepted Lister's protocols for antiseptic surgery and assumed that since germs caused infection and antiseptics killed germs, that antiseptics must cure infections. Wright and Fleming argued conversely that the leukocytes of the immune system were the body's most important line of defense against infection and that most antiseptics killed leukocytes more rapidly than they killed bacteria. The best treatment for infection, they said, was simply washing with copious saline. Few physicians, however, could believe this advice, which seemed to go against the latest and most profound advances in surgical technique for many years. In 1921 Fleming discovered lysozyme. A culture of his own nasal mucus (he had a cold) inhibited the growth of Staphylococcus cultured from that same mucus. Though he first thought it was bacteriophage, he soon realized it was a chemical present in the mucus and that it was a protein. He found that it was present in mucus from healthy noses, and as well in tears. Egg white contained high activity for lysozyme. The strain of bacteria he was culturing happened to be particularly sensitive to lysozyme; this was the first of two major chance events in Fleming's career. The weak concentrations of lysozyme Fleming was using, however, prevented him from seeing the broad antibiotic properties of lysozyme, and tthe broader medical applications of this discovery went unappreciated for years, by Fleming and everyone else at the time. The lysozyme work grew out of his interest in showing the ineffectiveness of chemical antiseptics to treat infection; like leukocytes, lysozyme was an endogenous way for the body to treat infection and demonstrated to Fleming the verity of Wright's conclusion that the best treatment was to enhance the body's own natural immune responses. The lysozyme work further stimulated Fleming's interest in antimicrobial agents. This work paved the way for the discovery of penicillin a few years later..........>....... A crude extract of the mold was then shown to have antibacterial properties. Fleming made this discovery in 1928 and by 1929 had named it penicillin (he was told by a colleague that the mold was a type of Penicillium and "penicillozyme" must have seemed cumbersome). Fleming continued to use penicillin in his lab but not with any great enthusiasm and certainly not to the exclusion of many other projects. He never developed it into a clinically useful compound, though in 1929 he suggested that it might have important clinical applications. Because he was a bacteriologist and not a chemist, Fleming did not attempt to purify penicillin. He seems to have run into a dead end with penicillin and so during the 1930s, though he kept it in his lab, he did not do much with it. In the late 1930s Australian Howard Florey came to London to work with Charles Sherrington. He worked on lysozyme for a while and then became interested in penicillin. It was Florey, with Chain and other of his group that developed penicillin into a clinincal antibiotic. They did this during 1940-41. Fleming, Florey, and Chain shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Above are excepted and not all my words.