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Biotech / Medical : ARIAD Pharmaceuticals -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mike McFarland who wrote (544)	5/15/1999 1:36:00 PM
From: Mike McFarland	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 4474

I see in the BBRS statement, reiterating the buy on ARIA (5/6/99) that "Because of the severity of GvHD, it is our belief that it will be absolutely essential for FDA- approved gene therapies to include a control switch that can kill the altered or doror cells if any signs of GvHD arise." I think that statement threw me off a bit in my attempted explanation over on the Yahoo board: Ariad's small molecule fas receptor activator is supposed to rapidly end a GvHD immune response which can occur after allogeneic BMT...or autologous T cell therapy. No matter what the source for the cell therapy, all cells have been altered to contain the suicide gene. After the GvHD is averted, therapy can begin again... Apparently, I was not quite on track with that-- from the link to the chapter on GvHD at Oncolink: "...a mild or moderate case of chronic GvHD seems to confer an anti-leukemic effect on the patient. Thus a little bit of GvHD in leukemic patients may actually be desirable. Completely depleting donor bone marrow of T-cells has not only reduced the incidence of GvHD, but has resulted in replapse rates as high as 65% among certain subsets of leukemic patients studied." Anyway, my latest stab at an answer to sicososa's question over on the Yahoo board would now be this: Deplete the patient's T-cells if that is neccessary, and aggressively treat the patient with the engineered donor T-cells. Having control over those T-cells would obviously give the oncologist an amazing level of control... forget about additional treatments, if you can carry that first treatment right to the edge and get things done the first time. So...I wonder how long it takes for a person to be obviously free of the cancer? I sure wish I had paid attention when my grandmother had lymphoma, I am terribly ignorant about all this. But I suspect I have a good stock here with Ariad, 30M marketcap is absurd, and I still wonder if the 5M toxic was on purpose to keep the stock depressed ...just long enough for the warrants to expire worthless and shake out a lot of weak hands, grumble grumble;-)