Word: biotechs
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Dormant for years, the biotech bug is once again infesting stocks. This nasty man-made microbe, hatched in the labs of Wall Street, surfaces every few years to prey on susceptible (i.e., gullible) investors. Symptoms include feverish optimism followed by cold chills of reality...
...YORK: An unsettling bit of science fiction crossed over into reality Monday morning in the form of Dolly, an embraceable ewe with an incredible past: She was an exact genetic copy of another lamb. News of the first-ever cloning of a mammal sent stock in the small Scottish biotech company responsible soaring as investors drooled (whole herds of the same prizewinning cow!) over the possibilities. More cautious types pointed out that this procedure could presumably, uh, be used to make copies of humans, which opens up an extremely large ethical can of worms. Ian Wilmut, one of the scientists...
That availability has also helped lure biotechnology firms. Covance Biotechnology Services, a pharmaceutical company, recently put up a $57 million bioprocessing facility that will house 130 employees by the end of the year. According to the North Carolina Biotechnology Center, the state's biotech payrolls will grow from 15,000 workers to 100,000 during the next 20 years...
...treatments build on what scientists have learned about the ways in which rheumatoid arthritis works. The problem starts when, for reasons no one fully understands, a few misguided T cells incite other immune-system cells called macrophages to attack the joints. The approach favored by IDEC Pharmaceuticals, a biotech company in San Diego, is to target all active T cells with a custom-made antibody that can temporarily knock the immune cells out of commission. Although this antibody treatment cannot distinguish between normal and misbehaving T cells, the gambit has proved successful. More than half the 122 patients...
...result of these discoveries, tests for the presence of genes that either cause disease or make people more susceptible to it are becoming increasingly available. "We are entering an era when disease will be predicted before it occurs," says William Haseltine, chairman of Human Genome Sciences, a Maryland biotech firm. "Medicine is basically going to change from a treatment-based to a prevention-based discipline...