Subject: Progress With Mice May Aid in Study Of Blood Disorders 
Date: Published: 2/28/92 (60 lines)
Source: Wall Street Journal. Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc.

    Technology & Medicine:
    Progress With Mice
    May Aid in Study
    Of Blood Disorders
    ----
    By Marilyn Chase
    Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

    A team of researchers from the University of Toronto and
 Immunex Corp. of Seattle reported advances in developing a
 laboratory mouse to help doctors study a range of human blood
 disorders from sickle-cell anemia to leukemia.
    The research extends the work on the so-called SCID mouse
 being pursued by several scientific teams in the U. S. and
 abroad.  These mice are immunodeficient lab animals which
 receive transplants of human cells to endow them with a
 humanlike immune system.  The goal is to adapt them for use in
 studying and treating AIDS, cancer and a variety of genetic
 disorders.
    So far, the growing field of SCID mouse research has been
 dominated by three groups:  Systemix Inc., Palo Alto, Calif.,
 which is 60%-controlled by Swiss pharmaceutical giant Sandoz
 Ltd.; the Medical Biology Institue in La Jolla, Calif.; and
 the Weizmann Institute of Rehovot, Israel.
    The Immunex-Toronto team discovered that giving the mice a
 unique combination of growth factors following bone marrow
 transplant nourished the regrowth of a wide range of red and
 white blood cells found in the human body.
    "This is an exciting paper, and a major advance in the
 development of a humanized mouse," said Jerome Groopman,
 chief of hematology at the New England Deaconess Hospital in
 Boston.
    Coaxing an array of transplanted cells to take root and
 mature makes the SCID mouse a potentially more powerful tool
 for the study of diseases that attack different elements of
 the blood and bone marrow.  These might include red-cell
 deficiencies like anemia and thalassemia, as well as the
 malignant overgrowth of white cells that occurs in leukemia.
    The key to repopulating these red and white blood-cell
 lineages was treating the mice with one or more human
 proteins:  human mast-cell growth factor, or Immunex's new
 hybrid protein called PIXY321, a combination of interleukin-3
 and GM-CSF. In some mice treated with both mast-cell factor
 and PIXY321, researchers reported that the mouse bone marrow
 was replaced by as much as 50% with human cells within a
 month.
    Overall, the treated mice produced at least 10 times more
 human cells than their untreated counterparts, the team said.
 The report in this week's edition of the journal Science was
 written by John E. Dick and Tsvee Lapidot and their
 colleagues at the University of Toronto, along with Douglas
 E. Williams of Immunex.

[This article is made available here by Dow Jones Co. for the
 personal and non-commercial use of callers to this bbs, in the
 hope that it will be of some help to those who are suffering
 from the disease and others who are seeking to help them.]