Word: interferon
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...great splash last year when stock from Genentech Inc. went public and jumped $45 per share during its first day on the market. The slightest technological advance still sends prices leaping. Genentech jumped $7 in one day two weeks ago when workers announced a new process to make interferon, a supposed cancer-fighting protein. Genentech will now use yeast to produce the human protein rather than bacteria. It doesn't seem like a major change, but two advantages come with this adjustment. First, yeast are especially suited to high-volume production (they have been used to make beer for hundreds...
This technological advance becomes more attractive to Genentech stockholders when you realize that the company began human clinical trials of interferon two months ago in conjunction with the pharmaceutical house Hoffman-Larouche. Eight advanced cancer patients in Houston are now being treated with interferon under the aegis of the National Cancer Institute...
Bitter legal disputes have already broken out. The University of California has sued Hoffmann-La Roche and Genentech on charges that a line of cells they use to produce a type of interferon was first created in the university's San Francisco labs (Genentech's Boyer was, and still is, a top researcher at U.C.S.F.). That case is still pending in the courts. But another squabble with the university has already cost Genentech $350,000, plus future royalty payments to the school. The money was awarded to the university for work done by one of its researchers on a hormone...
...with bacterially produced interferon, developed at Genentech. Interferon is part of a natural defense system against such viral diseases as influenza and hepatitis; it also seems to act against certain types of cancer, particularly cancer of the breast and the lymph nodes. But to date only extremely small quantities of it have been available, all painstakingly collected from blood cells and other human tissue. Relatively few patients, only several hundred out of the hundreds of thousands of cancer victims who might benefit from interferon, have been receiving the drug. Natural interferon is very costly (up to $150 for a daily...
...extremely well. Today, after less than five years, Genentech probably has the best research facilities in the gene-splicing business (40 Ph.D.s, 65 technicians). It has produced and is testing half a dozen recombinant DNA products, including insulin, human growth hormone and various types of human interferon. Swanson gives Boyer the highest grades: "For an academic, he's got an incredible sense of what's important from a business standpoint...