Biotech effect: New applications for current tools

With Sept. 11 on their minds, biotech companies race to reformulate their offerings or create new ones for use in a catastrophic event.

By Mark Moran, AMNews correspondent. Dec. 10, 2001.

It was an announcement likely to be of interest only to specialists in oncology and basic research: An investigational compound known as HE2100 was shown in animal models to inhibit human breast cancer cell proliferation, and to protect and restore the immune systems of animals exposed to whole-body radiation.

Reported in medical journals last year, the success of HE2100 -- one of a family of immune-regulating hormones developed by Hollis-Eden Pharmaceuticals of San Diego -- was a herald of safer and more effective treatment for cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy and radiation.

But today the radioprotective and immune-boosting effects of HE2100, which already had attracted the interest of the military, are being looked at with urgency by the company that developed it and by the federal government as a potential resource in an altogether different scenario.

"One can imagine a situation where you might have a nuclear explosion resulting from an attack on a nuclear power plant," says Dwight Stickney, MD, medical director at Hollis-Eden. "Further out from ground zero, you will have various doses of radiation to the whole body. The sensitive system is the hematopoietic system, decreasing white blood cells and platelets and leaving the body vulnerable to infection. If you have compounds that can stimulate the manufacture of both of those, you can potentially protect against the effects of radiation."

The story of HE2100 is a potent allegory of how the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the ensuing threat of bioterrorism have affected the American biotechnology industry and the ways in which the industry's products may conceivably be applied. [...]