Word: merck
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Rahway, N.J., chemists at Merck & Co., the country's biggest prescription drug manufacturer, stare into video display computer terminals at brightly colored, twisting geometric shapes reminiscent of an alien virus in a science-fiction epic. The scientists are testing the action of a new drug on an enzyme through computer simulation. Says Merck Research Fellow Graham Smith: "Instead of taking a month to synthesize a new compound, we can now do it in a few minutes...
...blood of carriers. Dr. Saul Krugman of New York University then discovered that when infected blood serum is boiled, the virus is killed but the antigen remains able to induce production of the antibodies that prevent the illness. The experimental vaccine was developed by Virologist Maurice Hilleman of the Merck Institute for Therapeutic Research. Should no hitches develop, the first hepatitis B vaccine may become commercially available in two years...
...laboratory. But less conventional routes are also being explored. One is to provoke the body into boosting its own manufacture of IF by injecting inducers, usually double strands of synthetic RNA* that resemble viruses. The method was tried in the 1960s by Maurice Hilleman and others at the Merck Institute. But inducers were virtually abandoned when they proved largely ineffective and, on occasion, highly toxic. A new inducer, though, has been showing some promising early results...
...developed a new mass-production technique that could reduce the cost of a dose of interferon to one-twentieth of its present cost. Earlier this month G.D. Searle & Co. announced plans to build a $12 million IF plant at its research facilities in Britain. Abbott Laboratories, Warner-Lambert, Merck & Co., and a number of other companies are also gearing up for interferon production. When Biogen S.A., a Swiss firm specializing in the new recombinant DNA (gene splicing) techniques, announced in January that it had induced bacteria to produce a facsimile of human interferon, the stock of Schering-Plough, a part...