| To: Brian Thomas Hertzog who wrote (58) | 7/13/1998 1:33:00 PM | | From: Robert L. Ray | | | |
Actually I bought more GMED today Brian. This thing truly seems to be a great bargain. You should check out the insider trades on Yahoo. I follow quite a few biotechs. (LGND being my favorite) But GMED looks better than any of them when it comes to insider buying. I notice one guy named Josef Bossart has accumulated around 60,000 shares;... And he just came to the company from a division of RPR dealing with gene therapy in March 97. So ya gotta believe that this guy at least has a lot of confidence in GMED. I mean geeze he left a big established company like RPR (Rhone Poulanc Roher) and came to GMED and in short order bought 60,000 shares. And they appear to be open market purchases too. Not employment/options related or anything.
Also although I oftentimes ridicule technicians because I'm a died in the wool fundamentalist but look at the chart. Anytime GMED gets to around 3 it seems to bounce back pretty strongly withen 3-6 months.
Also I'm hopeful on their IL-2 drug. IL-2 of course is an older drug that has been proven to be both effective and toxic at doses necessary to help in cancer therapy. But the GMED method of localized delivery of this drug vs. the conventional sytstemic delivery just could wind up being a winner. I like the fact that this is a drug that is proven to work for cancer already. So all GMED has to do is prove that their gene delivery method of it is effective and effectatious. I mean if they are able to produce high concentrations of IL-2 at the tumor site with a proven drug there's no logical reason to believe that it won't work as good or possibly better than IL-2 delivered systemically. IL-2 delivered systimically is *extremly* toxic. One thing I'm a little in the dark on is that IL-2 has been around a while. I'm not sure if anyone has any current valid patents on it or if it's something that's off patent and any drug company can use it with no licensing fees. I've never seen anything anywhere pertaining to licensing fees when it comes to IL-2 so I'm assuming it's off patent if there ever was a patent on it in the first place. Perhaps it came out of a government lab or something and is fair game for all?. Or at least fair game for a company enterprising enough to figure out a delivery method that will be effective in cancer without nearly killing the patient in the process:) |
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| To: LLCF who wrote (60) | 12/8/1998 1:44:00 AM | | From: Robert L. Ray | | | | |
Probably will only get deader since GMED is now pretty much slated to merge with MBIO. Actually I finally got tired of waiting and gave up on it, and moved on even though it had a good story. |
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| To: C.L. Shelby who wrote () | 2/23/1999 10:49:00 PM | | From: CoffeePot | | | |
Possible cancer inhibitor passes a test
boston.com
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. |
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