"The p53 story began in earnest about 20 years ago
Post# of 72440
Posted On: 12/04/2016 9:15:40 PM
"The p53 story began in earnest about 20 years ago. Excitement ran so high that, in 1993, Science magazine anointed it Molecule of the Year and put it on the cover. An editorial held out the possibility of “a cure of a terrible killer in the not too distant future.”
"In 1996, researchers at Roche noticed a small pocket between the behemoths where a tiny molecule might slip in and pry them apart. It took six years, but Roche found such a molecule and named it Nutlin because the lab was in Nutley, N.J.
But Nutlins did not work as drugs because they were not absorbed into the body.
Roche, Merck and Sanofi persevered, testing thousands of molecules.
At Sanofi, the stubborn scientist leading the way, Dr. Debussche, maintained an obsession with p53 for two decades. Finally, in 2009, his team, together with Shaomeng Wang at the University of Michigan and a biotech company, Ascenta Therapeutics, found a promising compound.
The company tested the drug by pumping it each day into the stomachs of mice with sarcoma.
A week later, Cedric Barriere, the scientist conducting the experiment, went to his boss, Dr. Debussche, saying, “Laurent, I have a problem.” He confessed that he had treated some of the mice only once. And their tumors had vanished.
Dr. Debussche was stunned. “We have to reproduce it,” he said. They did.
Dr. Debussche popped open a bottle of Champagne, but his team tempered its hope.
“The joke is if we were trying to cure mouse cancer we would have done it 30 years ago,” said Dr. Donald Bergstrom, a vice president at Sanofi."
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2012/12/23/health/n...ancer.html
"In 1996, researchers at Roche noticed a small pocket between the behemoths where a tiny molecule might slip in and pry them apart. It took six years, but Roche found such a molecule and named it Nutlin because the lab was in Nutley, N.J.
But Nutlins did not work as drugs because they were not absorbed into the body.
Roche, Merck and Sanofi persevered, testing thousands of molecules.
At Sanofi, the stubborn scientist leading the way, Dr. Debussche, maintained an obsession with p53 for two decades. Finally, in 2009, his team, together with Shaomeng Wang at the University of Michigan and a biotech company, Ascenta Therapeutics, found a promising compound.
The company tested the drug by pumping it each day into the stomachs of mice with sarcoma.
A week later, Cedric Barriere, the scientist conducting the experiment, went to his boss, Dr. Debussche, saying, “Laurent, I have a problem.” He confessed that he had treated some of the mice only once. And their tumors had vanished.
Dr. Debussche was stunned. “We have to reproduce it,” he said. They did.
Dr. Debussche popped open a bottle of Champagne, but his team tempered its hope.
“The joke is if we were trying to cure mouse cancer we would have done it 30 years ago,” said Dr. Donald Bergstrom, a vice president at Sanofi."
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2012/12/23/health/n...ancer.html
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