Here is another company that I think belongs on our list. Also an article in the NYTimes about them and what they are doing.
Coley Pharmaceutical Group
Yahoo financial analysis of the company
I have found a number of sites doing financial evaluations of the company Google and the article in the NYTimes addresses the approach of reinforcing the immune system that merits discussion among ourselves IMHO as well.
A Revival for Immunity
By ANDREW POLLACK
Published: October 5, 2005
In the late 1800's a New York surgeon named William B. Coley noticed that when one of his cancer patients developed a severe bacterial infection, the cancer disappeared. Over the following decades, Dr. Coley began injecting tumors with bacteria, with some success.
But the results were inconsistent, and critics derided the work as quackery. "Coley's toxins," as they were called, faded into disuse with the advent of radiation treatments and chemotherapy.
Now, though, recent discoveries about the immune system have spurred interest in modern descendants of Coley's toxins. Big drug makers are putting money into the effort, including Pfizer and Sanofi-Aventis, which have both placed bets on a biotechnology upstart named in honor of the surgeon, the Coley Pharmaceutical Group.
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The excitement centers on a class of human proteins called toll-like receptors, whose existence and crucial role in the immune system were discovered only in the last several years. The proteins act as molecular sentinels, recognizing the presence of bacteria or viruses and rousing the rest of the immune system to respond.
Coley Pharmaceutical and many other companies are now creating drugs meant to activate those sentinels, essentially fooling the body into thinking it has been infected without exposing it to real pathogens. The aim is to stimulate the immune system to fight cancer, hepatitis and other diseases.
Almost every big drug maker "is now very seriously thinking about acquiring or initiating internally a toll-like receptor effort," said Kleanthis Xanthopoulos, the chief executive of Anadys Pharmaceuticals, a publicly traded San Diego biotechnology company that develops drugs that act on the receptors.
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One drug that works through a toll-like receptor is already on the market, although it was developed before scientists recognized the role the receptor actually played. That drug, Aldara, by 3M, is used as a treatment for genital herpes, as well as for a form of skin cancer and another precancerous condition. Sales in this country last year were $211 million, according to IMS Health, a drug data and consulting firm.
In some cases drug makers, rather than activating the toll-like receptors, hope to block the receptors as a way of damping the immune system. Eisai, a Japanese company, recently reported results from a clinical trial in which a receptor blocker had modestly reduced the death rate from sepsis, an often fatal overreaction of the immune system.
Blocking toll-like receptors might also be a way to treat lupus and other autoimmune diseases, in which the body attacks its own tissues, said Douglas Golenbock, the chief of infectious diseases and immunology at the University of Massachusetts and a consultant to Idera and Eisai.
Many previous attempts to stimulate the immune system - by using so-called cancer vaccines, for example - have not worked. Others, like the immune-bolstering drugs interferon and interleukin-2, can cause debilitating side effects.
"The history of immune modulators is ugly," said Arthur M. Krieg, the founder and chief scientist of Coley, which is based in Wellesley, Mass. But he said that the new drugs appeared to stimulate the immune system in a more directed way.
Toll-like receptors are part of the innate immune system, which is the body's first line of defense against pathogens. The innate system's job is to keep pathogens in check for a few days until the second-line defense, the adaptive immune system, can kick in.
The adaptive immune system marshals antibodies and T cells that are highly specific for a particular pathogen. Once created, the antibodies and T cells can make quick work of the same pathogen if it appears even years later - the reason that vaccines work and that people do not get chickenpox or measles more than once.
For many years most immunologists had paid scant attention to the innate immune system, considering it far more primitive than the adaptive system. But now scientists realize that the toll-like receptors in the innate system are necessary for activating the adaptive system.
"The adaptive immune system would not even know what hit it, without the innate immune system," said Ruslan Medzhitov, a professor of immunobiology at Yale. He is also co-founder of VaxInnate, a start-up using research in toll-like receptors in pursuit of better vaccines, including a flu shot that would work against all strains.
The name of the receptors comes from the German word "toll," which might be translated as "amazing" or "far out." In the mid-1980's a German scientist, Christiane Nusslein-Volhard, was mutating fruit fly genes to study the effect on embryo development, work that won her a Nobel Prize in 1995. She found one mutant embryo that struck her as so weird she gave the name "toll" to the gene that caused it.
Through the late 1990's other scientists discovered that the same toll gene also had a role in immune defense and that humans and other mammals had a whole family of similar, or toll-like, genes.
Humans have 10 known active toll-like receptors. Mainly found in certain immune system cells, the receptors sit on the surface of cells or, in some cases, inside them, and recognize particular telltale characteristics or components of pathogens.
Toll-like receptor 5, for instance, recognizes a protein in the tails that some bacteria use to swim.
The biggest focus for drug developers so far has been receptor 9, which recognizes DNA that contains a particular genetic-code sequence that is common in viruses and bacteria but not in humans. Coley's lead drug, Promune, is a short segment of DNA that contains the pathogen code pattern but has been chemically stabilized to survive longer in the body.
In a Phase 2, or midstage, clinical trial involving 112 patients with lung cancer, those who got Promune along with chemotherapy lived for a median period of 12.8 months, compared with 6.8 months for those receiving chemotherapy alone.
I am posting this subject and excerpts here but I also hope that we return to the issue of immunity in far greater depth in the biotech section where the general issue can be better developed.
