1/10/01

Mitch Emmons, 334/844-5964

AUBURN RESEARCHERS REFINING NEW DRUG DELIVERY SYSTEM

AUBURN ­ A new in vivo drug delivery system that can aid in the treatment of such medical conditions as muscular dystrophy, diabetes, heart disease and muscle-related tumors, is being refined by an Auburn University research team.

The researchers at the Scott-Ritchey Research Center at AU's College of Veterinary Medicine have applied for a patent on the new gene therapy-based technology.

Bruce Smith, an associate professor, says the development is a spinoff from an earlier collaborative project with the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

"In that project, we were searching for a better way to treat muscular dystrophy," Smith said. "We found that gene therapy could be used to treat individual muscles by injection, but we needed a way to treat the entire skeletal muscle system without injecting every muscle, which would be most unpleasant for the patient."

Smith and the AU team are working to develop a way to administer the treatment intravenously. He says the technique uses small peptides -- chains of seven different amino acids -- to target treatments to specific tissues. These targeting peptides are central to successful treatment.

"The research involves examining phage display libraries; collections of more than one billion different peptides attached to a purified virus," Smith said. "These viruses normally will not bind to a cell, but a few of the peptides enable the virus to bind to muscle tissue."

The process appears to be identifying new artificially created molecular sequences, he said. The research project is now focused on optimizing the ability of the peptides to bind to skeletal muscle tissue by identifying the specific component of the cell to which they attach, and finding peptides that bind to other tissues such as brain and tumor cells.

"Once we maximize the interaction of these peptides with their targets, these molecules can be linked to a drug or gene therapy treatment, and the treatment targeted to specific tissues," Smith said.

In addition to Smith, others on the research team include Henry Baker, director of the Scott-Ritchey Research Center, and Assistant Professor Tatiana Samoylova.

jan01:AU-gene

CONTACT: Smith, 334/844- 5587.