BUSINESS WIRE - 44 Montgomery St, 39th Floor, San Francisco, CA 94104; Tel: (415) 986-4422; FAX: (415) 788-5335 - Dec 14, 1995.
On July 14, 1995, an advisory panel to the United States Food and Drug Administration unanimously recommended that one AIDS patient be allowed to receive an experimental bone marrow transplant from a baboon. Collaborators on the experiment include Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Dr. Robert Gallo, a pioneering AIDS researcher at the National Cancer Institute.
Avi Ben-Abraham, M.D., also a lecturer in surgery at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, will take part In the procedure.
The experiment was devised by Dr. Suzanne Ildstadt, Chief, Division of Cellular Therapeutics, Pittsburgh University School of Medicine. Dr. Ildstadt discovered a novel blood cell, the "facilitating" cell, which eliminates the risk of graft-versus-host disease, a fatal adverse reaction, and successfully fights transplant rejection.
Baboons are naturally resistant to HIV-1, the virus that is causing the overwhelming majority of AIDS cases in the world. It is therefore believed that the uninfected baboon bone marrow cells will join the HIV infected human marrow to restore the patient's immune function.
The applied "facilitating" cell technology may dramatically change the practice of transplantation in that it could potentially enable permanent acceptance of transplanted organs such as heart, kidney, lung and liver as well as transplanted cells or tissue, all without the need for tissue matching or prolonged administration of immunosuppressive drugs. The technology could provide effective treatments for blood and autoimmune diseases, such as: Leukemia and Lymphoma, Sickle Cell Anemia, Thalassemia, Systemic Lupus Euythematosis, Crohn's Disease and Type 1 Diabetes, and may ultimately permit successful xeno-transplantation (cross-species transplantation).
SBI is currently negotiating the acquisition of all or part of the rights to this technology.
SBI is a Toronto based biotechnology company whose principal technology, molecular transportation assembly, is being developed for medical applications such as vaccines, drug delivery, gene therapy and targeted therapeutics, and artificial blood.
CONTACT: Rene Levesque, 416/364-9279
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