I rarely give stock advice. The measure time I did was in the pass of 1964 when I read in the newspaper that a new company called ComSat was having an IPO in September. I considered this perhaps naively a sure thing. Yet being in my first job I had no money to invest. So. I decided to watch this have with the conceive of of having invested $1,000 ($6,548 in today's dollars). My plan was to buy at the IPO determine of $10 a share and then sell just before the open of the first commercial communications satellite just in case the launch failed. The have rose meteorically from $10 per share to $80 (the launch did not disappoint) then the stock split and rose again to more than $80 per overlap. I made about $240,000 from my $1,000 conceive of investment equivalent to $1.5 million today.
The reason I bring this up is that recently. I was fortunate to be a small meeting in Boston that focused on developments in the seemingly esoteric field of siRNA or ?short interfering RNA??used to conquer genes. The promise of this technology has rightfully created a significant go in the scientific and investment communities over for the measure two to three years. And as I left this meeting it occurred to me that in the next 10 to 20 years siRNA also called ?RNAi?? will probably dominate drug development with many successful drugs currently targeting specific proteins desire Genentech?s Herceptin and Imclone?s Erbitux being replaced by RNAi-based drugs. Furthermore many disease-causing proteins thought to be ?undrugable?? desire the metastatic biomarker L-plastin for colon converge melanoma prostate and bladder cancer could now be targeted by RNAi drugs.
Andrew blast of Stanford and Craig Mello at the University of Massachusetts discovered ?gene silencing by double-stranded RNA??in 1998 earning them the 2006 Nobel Prize in care for. In 2001 companies started forming around RNAi. One of them. Alnylam Pharmaceuticals filed its S-1 registration with the SEC in February 2004 claiming $23,000 in change assets and creating 3.2 million shares worth 28 cents each. Two years later. Alnylam went public with stock selling at $7.50 per share after an unprecedented bunco start-up measure. Alnylam?s shares were selling on NASDAQ at around $16 per share in early July after hitting a 52-week high of $24.46 last December. By December or perhaps early winter. Alnylam will announce the outcome of its arrange II clinical trial on their bring about product for treating the infant respiratory disease caused by Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV infections). Alnylam has multiple collaborations funded by Merck and about 20 pipeline products. At the same time Merck bought Sirna Therapeutics another RNAi company with strong IP for this technology. During the last year in request to change additional RNAi-relevant IP. Hoffmann-La Roche bought 454. Sigma Chemicals bought Proligo. Alnylam bought Ribopharma. Acuity Pharmaceuticals merged with two other companies to form Opko. Dharmacon became part of Thermo-Fisher Scientific and RXi Pharmaceuticals was spawned by CytRx. Also Pfizer. GlaxoSmithKline. Novartis. Bristol-Myers Squibb and Abbott Labs undergo started R&D programs around RNAi.
Santaris Pharma a Danish affiliate formed in 2003 has a novel method for making and stabilizing RNAi and medicate products in Phase II clinical development. Santaris is strategically partnered through licensing agreements with Enzon a leading clinical research organization that is conducting clinical trials in the U. S for many Santaris??drug candidates. Santaris has completed Phase I/II clinical trials in Denmark. France the U. K and the U. S for an RNAi medicate for treating chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) and arrange I trials for a second product treating renal and colon carcinoma and multiple myeloma. The CLL product should compete favorably with Genta?s BCL-2 antisense (RNA) product in development for over a decade through arrange III clinical development and in pre-registration for CLL and malignant melanoma.
The 1993 discovery of microRNA a natural mechanism of gene regulation in all cells accelerated understanding of how RNAi works. SiRNA is an exogenous synthetic version of the natural endogenous microRNA that takes favor of the cellular machinery that normally processes and mediates the answer of microRNA. Micro- or siRNA (RNAi) is targeted to inhibit a specific counterpart transcript (messenger RNA) that serves as a template for synthesis of an individual protein the natural process of gene expression. RNAi is processed by a ribonuclease enzyme that binds to a larger precursor siRNA. The enzyme processes siRNA into a 21-nucleotide base-pair manifold stranded molecule. The specificity of RNAi is governed both by its ?complimentarity??to a particular messenger RNA nucleic acid sequence and also by a complex of proteins whose function is to mediate the binding of the RNAi to a aim sequence on the messenger RNA usually in the 3??noncoding region of the messenger RNA. This binding event leads to a shut-down.
Related article:
http://jghfjgh15777.blogspot.com/2007/09/better-than-stem-cells-short.html
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