Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Strategies & Market Trends : Anthony @ Equity Investigations, Dear Anthony, -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Justin Curran who wrote (13861)	2/23/1999 3:13:00 PM
From: Land Shark	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 122088

ENMD cracking at the seams ... Avg. trade size been falling all day.

To: Justin Curran who wrote (13861)	2/23/1999 3:34:00 PM
From: Doorman	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 122088

Justin, Here's the full Boston Globe Story. This the the reason for today's surge in ENMD. Note it's about endostatin, not to be confused with angiostatin which is the drug BM pulled out from. Possible cancer inhibitor passes a test Hopes raised for periodic injections By Richard Saltus, Globe Staff, 02/23/99 ETHESDA, Md. - Scientists said yesterday that they had sharply slowed cancer growth in mice by injecting them with genes that create endostatin, the protein used by a Children's Hospital researcher to eliminate tumors in mice. The experiment raises the possibility that cancer patients might receive weekly injections of endostatin, which is known as an angiogenesis inhibitor. The injections would instruct the patient's cells to make endostatin, and to secrete it into the bloodstream. If the method proves viable in future human tests, it might be a way to get around the difficulties faced by company scientists who are trying to make endostatin synthetically, in drug form. ''The beauty of this approach is that it's so clean,'' said Wang Min, a senior scientist at Gene Medicine Inc., a Houston biotech company. ''You just put the endostatin gene in, and the body makes the pure protein - no contamination,'' he said. The gene, the DNA blueprint for endostatin, was injected into the muscles of mice that had received transplants a week previously of lung or kidney cancer cells. Once a week for two weeks, the mice got the endostatin injections. Min said that the tumors in the treated mice grew much more slowly than in untreated mice, so that their tumors were 60 to 70 percent smaller, and they had six times fewer metastases, cancer that spread from the primary tumor. The effect on the tumors was not nearly as dramatic as that obtained by Dr. Judah Folkman and his colleagues at Children's Hospital in Boston, where mice given endostatin protein have had tumors shrink to invisibility. However, Dr. James Pluda, a senior investigator with the National Cancer Institute, said that the gene therapy technique might be used in combination with other anti-cancer drugs to control tumors so that patients could live a long and relatively normal life. Other scientists have used gene therapy to put endostatin genes into animals' bodies to combat tumors. But in those previous experiments, the endostatin DNA was carried into the animals' cells with a crippled virus. In Min's research, the endostatin gene was spliced into a simple DNA ring, which is less likely to cause adverse reactions, he said. And he said the DNA carriers are simple and cheap to make. Scientists from academic laboratories, biotechnology companies and large pharmaceutical corporations are attending the two-day meeting sponsored by the Institute of International Research, which puts on a variety of scientific conferences. Endostatin is only one of dozens of compounds that have been found to inhibit angiogenesis - the growth of new blood vessels in the body that a tumor needs to grow and survive. Blocking angiogenesis can slow or halt the growth of tumors, or - as in Folkman's experiments - even cause them to shrink away. Endostatin and another angiogenesis inhibitor discovered in Folkman's lab, angiostatin, are in the medical spotlight as the National Cancer Institute and the biotech company EntreMed Inc. are working to move those drugs into their first human tests, perhaps later this year. EntreMed scientists are scheduled to report on recent progress in making large quantities of angiostatin and endostatin at today's sessions of the conference. Last week, in what stock market investors saw as a setback for the field, the pharmaceutical giant Bristol Myers Squibb said it was halting work on the development of angiostatin under a license from Entremed because the protein was proving too difficult to make in large quantities that were consistently effective. Scientists here downplayed this setback because there are many other angiogenesis inhibitors. A number of angiogenesis inhibitors that predate the discovery of angiostatin and endostatin are in early stages of tests in human cancer patients, but little information about the results has been released by the companies carrying them out. Reports are likely to be aired this spring. This story ran on page A11 of the Boston Globe on 02/23/99. © Copyright 1999 Globe Newspaper Company.