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Platform Tickets
- Mr. Sreedhar Venkata Sunkara

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Dear Friends.... 'Platform tickets' How to create lots of drugs at once THE best platform technologies of all are not those that merely enable drug discovery to proceed, but are new classes of molecules that themselves act as drugs. Therapeutic antibodies are in this category. A dozen have already been approved by America's Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and well over 100 more are undergoing clinical trials. Antibodies are the workhorses of the immune system. Like most proteins, they have an “active site” on their surface, which is shaped to fit with part of another molecule. Unlike other proteins, though, antibodies can have active sites of many shapes. In nature, that allows them to lock on to parts of invading pathogens, neutralising the invader. In the laboratory it means that biotechnologists can create antibodies with active sites tailored to perform particular tasks. One task they are often asked to perform is to attach themselves to a cancer cell. Genentech, the oldest biotechnology company around, has two therapeutic antibodies on the market designed do just that: Herceptin, which attacks breast cancer, and Rituxan, which attacks a form of cancer called non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. The latest wheeze, perfected by IDEC, is to attach a radioactive isotope to an antibody, so that when the isotope decays, the target cell is destroyed by the radiation. This is the most precise form of radiotherapy imaginable. Rheumatoid arthritis is another target. Humira, an antibody developed by Cambridge Antibody Technology (a British company that is one of the bidders for Oxford GlycoSciences) attaches itself to a molecule called tumour necrosis factor which is a vital link in the molecular chain that causes arthritis. Antibodies were also at the centre of the recent ImClone scandal. When the FDA rejected the firm's most promising antibody at the end of 2001 because of sloppy clinical trials, Martha Stewart, a lifestyle guru who is a friend of the company's former chief executive, Sam Waksal, was accused of insider dealing. Mr Waksal has agreed to pay a large fine. Scandal aside, therapeutic antibodies have proved to be a successful new class of drugs. Isis Pharmaceuticals of Carlsbad, California, has launched another new class which it hopes will be equally successful. Isis controls the critical patents for “antisense” RNA-based drugs. The first of these, designed to take on a bug called cytomegalovirus (which grows in the eyes of AIDS patients, often causing blindness if untreated), is now on sale. Fourteen others, aimed to zap inflammation and cancer, are in the pipeline. Antisense drugs work by ambushing the messenger RNA molecules that carry the instructions for making proteins from a cell's nucleus to the protein-making machinery outside. These messengers are copies of one of the strands of a DNA molecule in the nucleus. Message-carrying strands are known as “sense” strands, hence their complements are antisense. In principle, RNA molecules can form double-stranded helices, just like DNA does. The reason they do not is that cells do not manufacture the appropriate antisense strands. But such strands can be made by the hand of man. And if sense and antisense should meet, the resulting double-stranded molecule no longer works, so the protein the sense strand encodes is not made any more. If too much of that protein is causing a disease, mugging the messenger this way may stop the illness. so........ my dear friends. do u think that the drugs can really cure that some dangerous diseases.... so why they did not find the drugs for 'AIDS' or the latest 'SARS'..... Think about it...... Yours Originally, Sreedhar S. Venkata.

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