Word: miceli
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Then, last year, the Amyloid People staged a surprise attack. First, researchers at Elan Pharmaceuticals of South San Francisco stunned their colleagues by reporting that they had taken mice genetically engineered to develop plaques and vaccinated them with a fragment of beta amyloid. Twelve months later, seven out of nine mice remained plaque free. Then the Elan team vaccinated year-old mice whose brains were riddled with plaques. Result: the plaques started to melt away. Elan quickly drew up plans to test the vaccine in humans...
...question we still need to resolve," muses neurogeneticist John Hardy of the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Fla., "is, What is the relationship between beta amyloid and tau?" That is why Hardy and others are so excited by the new strain of transgenic mice that scientists are breeding. By crossing mice that develop tangles with mice that develop plaques, they should finally be able to provide scientists with a research tool they've sorely lacked: lab animals that closely approximate the disease in humans...
...most straightforward approach to fighting Alzheimer's plaques is to target their main ingredient, a protein called beta amyloid. Last summer scientists from Elan Pharmaceuticals, a biotech firm located in Ireland, reported that they had developed a vaccine that could shrink the plaques--at least in mice. Here the idea is to prime the immune system to treat amyloid proteins just as it would any foreign invader and target them for destruction. The concept is somewhat counterintuitive, since most researchers believe that at least part of the damage in Alzheimer's disease is caused by the immune system's overreaction...
...when these Internet elephants begin to stumble, the mice get crushed. For every Amazon or Yahoo, there are 10,000 smaller Net companies that never got the chance to go public--and now probably never will. For those companies and their employees, who believed just as hard as Jeff Bezos and Jerry Yang but got to the barricades a lot later, the business climate is drastically different. Call it the new new economy...
...summer's American Pie, and Green has the equivalent of that film's gonzo pastry scene: he drops a live mouse into his mouth. Says director Todd Phillips: "In the script, Tom was only supposed to tease the mouse, but he took it a step further. In fact, six mice died in that scene...just kidding...