Developments to Watch
Edited by Otis Port
Waking Up a Sleeping Anticancer Gene
When cells turn malignant, the immune system can often spot and kill them before they grow into tumors. But this sentinel system fails far too often. Geneticist and immunologist Wilfred A. Jefferies at the University of British Columbia wanted to know why. Searching for genes that are turned on and off in cancer cells, he discovered that a crucial gene is silenced in more than half of tumors--and in virtually all metastatic cancers. Its role: making a protein, dubbed TAP, that performs a key step in moving characteristic markers called antigens to the surfaces of cells. Without TAP, there are no cancer markers, so the immune system fails to spot the rogue cells.
If he added an active version of the gene to tumor cells, Jefferies wondered, would the immune system then attack the cancer? His experiments in mice show that the answer is yes. When he used a modified virus to carry the TAP gene into mice with extensive small-cell lung tumors, 30% of the mice were cured. The rest showed no metastasis and lived twice as long as those without the gene.
Before Jefferies can try this approach in humans, the Food & Drug Administration wants proof it is safe to insert the gene. Jefferies, now chief science officer of startup GeneMax Corp. (GMXX
) in Blaine, Wash., believes the company should be able to answer the safety questions and start clinical trials in melanoma patients within 18 months. In a forthcoming paper, he will also present data showing that adding the TAP protein can bolster the immune response to infectious agents such as HIV and smallpox.
By John Carey
One Way to Make Drugs in a Flash
Manufacturing drugs is no snap. Besides exacting requirements for purity and quality control, many chemical brews can take days or weeks to crystallize into a powder. Complicating matters further, as the crystals form, some molecules can assemble into two or more arrangements--and each of these so-called polymorphs can have dramatically different pharmaceutical and biological properties. The amino acid glycine, for example, has three polymorphic variations.
Soon, producing the desired polymorph of glycine, and perhaps of other amino acids, could get a lot easier. Chemical engineers at Polytechnic University in Brooklyn, N.Y., and Chicago's Illinois Institute of Technology have discovered that a flash of polarized laser light will instantly transform liquid glycine into one of two crystalline morphs, depending on how the light is polarized (the third version forms when the glycine isn't zapped with a laser).
Bruce A. Garetz at Polytechnic and Allan S. Myerson in Illinois accidentally stumbled on the ability of lasers to induce rapid crystallization six years ago while studying urea, an industrial chemical. The recent discovery that the technique has pharmaceutical applications could have a big payoff. Already, the pair is branching into protein crystallization, which ordinarily can take months.
This Bird Hatched a Robotic Jet Bomber
If the gull-wing plane pictured here bears more than a passing resemblance to Klingon spaceships from the Star Trek TV series, that's probably just coincidence--but who knows? Dubbed Bird of Prey, the plane had been a tightly guarded secret. Only a few hundred people had even seen this futuristic jet until Boeing Co. pulled off its black cloak in mid-October.
While the stealthy aircraft will no longer take to the sky over the Air Force's hush-hush test range in Nevada--it has been retired--the 38 flights it made there since 1996 provided Boeing (BA
) with a wealth of new technology. The radar-evading shape of its fuselage and jet intake, for example, were refined for Boeing's X-45 unmanned combat-air vehicle, which recently made its maiden flight. The X-45 UCAV is a prototype robotic jet bomber designed to knock out enemy air defenses. It does the F-117 one better by not risking pilots' lives. Boeing picked up the entire $67 million tab for the Bird of Prey program and hopes to parlay that eventually into a juicy production contract for UCAVs.
By Stanley Holmes
Innovations
-- Because explosives can be wrapped tightly enough to elude today's mechanical sniffers, there is no perfect replacement for dogs trained to sniff out bombs. Still, minute amounts of vapor will almost always escape--and if a dog can pick up their scent, so can the gadget developed by researcher Duncan Graham at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland. A low-cost analytical technique--with the fancy name of surface-enhanced resonance Raman scattering (SERRS)--can detect faint whiffs of plastic-explosive vapors if the instrument treats incoming vapors with a mixture of sodium and mercury.
-- Around the world, old books and documents are crumbling because paper made with wood contains acids that eat away the fibers. To halt the rot, librarians laboriously sprinkle paper with grains of magnesium oxide, which combines with water in the air to create an alkali that neutralizes the acids. Now, University of Florence scientists have devised a treatment that they claim is faster and more effective. Tiny particles of calcium hydroxide are dissolved in propanol alcohol and sprayed on the paper. The fibers soak up the particles, forming an internal reservoir of alkali that keeps on fighting the effects of wood-pulp acids.
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Copyright 2002, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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