Rockville: Anthrax (Prevention) Central

The >Business Gazette reports that Human Genome Sciences is poised to deliver a first: a product. Their drug, ABthrax, is slated to be delivered this year to the Federal government.

[The company] expects revenues to keep increasing significantly in 2008 by delivering about 70 percent of a $165 million federal order for its ABthrax anthrax drug late in the year. It will be the 16-year-old biotech pioneer’s first product on the market.

I don’t fully understand how ABthrax works (which is why I do not work at HGS, I suppose), but it looks pretty darn successful — in a test in rabbits, according to the company, “a single injection of ABthrax at the highest dose administered within one hour after [infection] provided 100% protection against lethality.” You can see a picture (from HGS) of how it works at the right.

The little green guys are “protective antigens,” which sounds nice but they are actually what allows the anthrax to bind to human cells (the purple blob). ABthrax (the yellow Y’s) occupies the green guys so the lethal parts (the little black and grey ovals) of the anthrax infection can’t get in.

HGS is not the only Rockville company involved in protecting U.S. citizens from terrorist threats that use anthrax. Emergent BioSolutions is also in the game, manufacturing the already-in-use vaccine against anthrax.

Together, according to the Gazette, these two companies provide two “prong[s] of the nation’s defense against future anthrax attacks:” a vaccine, an antibiotic to kill the anthrax bacteria in the body, and ABthrax to prevent death.

This is just one example of how interesting it can be living here in Rockville, which, as we have mentioned before, is a center for many different national and global crosscurrents.

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