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Non-Tech : NIFTY NINE IN NINETY NINE PLUS ONE -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Steve Lokness who wrote (242)	1/24/1999 11:56:00 PM
From: Mike McFarland	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 613

GLGC...Q&A attack of the bionewbies... First of all from third quarter we have The company had a third-quarter net loss of $37.8 million, or $2.54 per share, including a one-time charge of $35.2 million, or $2.36 per share, for acquisition of in-process research and development. The in-process R&D was obtained through acquisition of Oncormed Inc., which provided Gene Logic with development-stage genomic database and pharmacogenomics technologies. You said something about understanding the progression of disease...I don't really think that is quite what is going on here. In fact, from the vcall tape, you will hear that the discussion was really more about screening out all the useless compounds fast--and getting a lot of the molecular toxicology done up front...but then he did point out that with most genes, the relevent toxicology pathways are unknown--dosing levels unknown etc. Anyway... I am sort of slowly getting the flavor of what tissue based expression is all about...up/down regulated>> differential expression>>screening/running assays on protein classes...but Biology 101 is what is not coming back to me!--diseased tissue has had a major meltdown, it ain't working so maybe you dont want to screen out those compounds which start switching the genes on and off and which are not toxic to diseased tissue. Of course I am oversimplifying this so much that my questions are absurd--presumably these guys already know the genes they are after...they even build them into the chip! We assume the diseased tissue is diseased because it is genetically flawed (??) and there are only 100 or so really important genes (so far) for which you want to be screening compounds--which is why glgc builds it's chip without the other 49,900 data points on it. You want to do very specific things with certain genes-- more elegant than bathing tissue in an IL blocker or cytokine trap huh? Really wild stuff...boy if I would stay off the PC and read my biology text, maybe then I could ask better questions! Maybe I have missed the point entirely and that you are not finding compounds which effect genes--just using that trick to screen for molucules. It just seems like a high point to start at--the cascade of cellular events is so vast, why start at the very top?

To: Steve Lokness who wrote (242)	1/25/1999 7:48:00 AM
From: Arthur Radley	Respond to of 613

Steve, The company that GLGC purchased was Oncormed(ONM). With this purchase they got ONM's repository of human tissue samples specially collected for use in gene-expression studies. This collection will speedup GLGC's development of proprietary databases of gene-expresion information from a variety of normal and diseased human tissues. GLGC wanted to get into the area that ONM was working and by purchasing the company they were able to speed up the process. Most of the ONM'ed scientific staff made the transfer over to GLGC because GLGC had budgeted before making the offer to acquire them. Apparently it was ONM that had the alliance with Affymetrix and GLGC is continuing this relationship. As part of their investor packet, they include a background paper as to how Differential Display Technology works. The utility of differential display is that it allows researchers to compare the bands from different samples--for instance, normal heart muscle and heart muscle from patients with various stages of heart disease. The quantitative differences reveal genes that are either over or under-expressed in the diseased state. These genes may play a key role in the disease process. If one of these genes appears to be suitable drug target, the corresponding cDNA can be obtained from the gel and used to make a probe that will find the gene in a tissue sample. Once the gene is found, its full DNA sequence can be obtained.