Abstract

Scrambling for Biotech Bucks

It is informed that three researchers at the National Institutes of Health (N.I.H.) hope to inject a gene obtained from bacteria into ten terminally ill cancer patients. If their experiment is successful, a small firm named Genetic Therapy Inc. may be on its way to considerable wealth. W. French Anderson, Steven Rosenberg and R. Michael Blaese, the three N.I.H. scientists, are not implanting the gene to cure the patients. Instead, it will act as a marker to help them study the effectiveness of an experimental cancer treatment that uses a special type of white blood cell known as a tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte, or TIL. The researchers will remove a quantity of TILs from the patients, isolate them in culture and infect the cells with the foreign gene. These altered cells will then be placed back into the patient's body. The TILs, as part of the cancer treatment, attack the tumors of the patients being tested; their effectiveness in fighting the disease, the researchers say, will be demonstrated by the number of gene-marked TILs that find their way to the tumors of the ten patients.