"The discovery of BLyS and its potential medical application is a milestone for immunology and medicine," said William Haseltine, Ph.D., Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Human Genome Sciences. "This discovery helps us to understand how the body fights infection and how vaccines work. It is our hope that we can rapidly apply this discovery to the development of new treatments for several serious immune deficiency diseases. We also hope that this discovery will help to overcome the barriers to the creation of successful vaccines for serious infectious disease problems, such as AIDS and Malaria."
Craig Rosen, Ph.D., Senior Vice President Research and Development of HGS said, "The discovery of BLyS represents an exciting application of the integrated set of new genomic technologies that we have developed at HGS over the past three years. We believe that many important new drugs will result from the systematic study of genes and proteins that control cell to cell communication. I am very pleased that our human gene discovery efforts, coupled with our high-throughput systems, resulted in the discovery of this missing component of the immune system. I view this success as validation of a new and fundamentally different approach to the discovery of medical uses of human genes."
The authors of the paper published by Science include: Paul A. Moore, Ph.D.;
Ornella Belvedere, M.D.; Amy Orr; Krystyna Pieri; David W. LaFleur; Ping Feng,
Ph.D.; Daniel Soppet, Ph.D.; Meghan Charters; Reiner L. Gentz, Ph.D.; David
Parmelee, Ph.D.; Yuling Li; Olga Galperina; Judith G. Giri, Ph.D.; Vi
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Contact: Kate de Santis
Kate_de_Santis@hgsi.com
301-251-6003
Human Genome Sciences, Inc.
9-Jul-1999