Word: genentech
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AIso in the future but perhaps more feasible are gene-splicing applications in the fields of animal husbandry and agriculture. Under a contract with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Genentech is already working on a vaccine against hoof-and-mouth disease, which kills off millions of food-producing animals a year round the world. Geneticists also hope to endow such basic food plants as wheat, corn and rice with the ability to "fix'' or draw their own nitrogen from the air. At present, nitrogen must be provided in expensive fertilizers made from increasingly costly petroleum products. But scientists using plasmids...
...Genentech Inc. was co-founded in 1976, in South San Francisco, by Venture Capitalist Robert Swanson, 32, and University of California Biochemist Herbert Boyer, 44. The company now has a staff of 200. It has signed research agreements with several large pharmaceutical houses, including Hoffmann-La Roche and A.B. Kabi, and leads all gene-splicing firms by offering half a dozen products. Among them: several types of interferon, one of which is now undergoing clinical trials. Genentech is also collaborating with another leading drug company, Eli Lilly, on mass production of human insulin. Last week Genentech announced its latest gene...
Bitter legal disputes have already broken out. The University of California has sued Hoffmann-La Roche and Genentech on charges that a line of cells they use to produce a type of interferon was first created in the university's San Francisco labs (Genentech's Boyer was, and still is, a top researcher at U.C.S.F.). That case is still pending in the courts. But another squabble with the university has already cost Genentech $350,000, plus future royalty payments to the school. The money was awarded to the university for work done by one of its researchers on a hormone...
...with bacterially produced interferon, developed at Genentech. Interferon is part of a natural defense system against such viral diseases as influenza and hepatitis; it also seems to act against certain types of cancer, particularly cancer of the breast and the lymph nodes. But to date only extremely small quantities of it have been available, all painstakingly collected from blood cells and other human tissue. Relatively few patients, only several hundred out of the hundreds of thousands of cancer victims who might benefit from interferon, have been receiving the drug. Natural interferon is very costly (up to $150 for a daily...
Another scarce drug now bubbling out of Genentech's stainless-steel fermentation vat is human growth hormone, used to treat dwarfism. Only limited quantities have been available, most of it extracted from the pituitary glands of cadavers. In a test of the hormone, 20 youngsters are currently getting doses of bacterially produced HGH at London's Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children...