Message #3 From:
NewsBot Date: July 27, 2006 06:00:00 AM
CYDY News CytoDyn Briefs Shareholders On Competing Flu Vaccines
SANTA FE, N.M.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 27, 2006--CytoDyn, Inc. (OTCBB:CYDY) has briefed its shareholders on flu vaccines that compete with the DNA plasmids being developed by the company's wholly owned subsidiary Advanced Influenza Technologies, Inc. (AITI) under license from the University of Massachusetts Medical Center.
According to CytoDyn's CEO, Allen D. Allen, ordinary vaccines contain altered copies of the virus and, therefore, require a source for growing out large quantities of the wild, disease-causing virus for the raw material. This makes manufacturing more difficult, in part by imposing stringent safeguards to prevent contamination of the product. A more important problem, according to Allen, is "antigenic drift," the way a flu virus changes slightly as it replicates and mutates in the environment.
The H5N1 bird flu virus is very poor at infecting humans. Despite the ubiquitous and spreading presence of this virus around the world, there are only a few hundred known cases of human infection, Allen pointed out. Public health officials are nonetheless concerned because the virus may change to more readily infect humans. The 1957 pandemic of Asian Flu, which killed an estimated two million people worldwide, is known to have arisen when a bird flu virus combined with a human flu virus.
One advantage of DNA plasmids is that no virus is needed for manufacturing this type of product. Another advantage is that the DNA for multiple species of flu virus can be combined to produce a polyvalent injection (www.cytodyn.com/dna_plasmids.htm). This could be necessary if antigenic drift reduces the effectiveness of the vaccine recently announced as being in development at GlaxoSmithKline (NYSE:GSK) or flu vaccines in the pipeline at French-based Sanofi Aventis (NYSE:SNY). Absent the possibility of such an antigenic drift, few public health officials would be concerned about H5N1, according to Allen.
Forward looking statements are statements that are not historical facts. The Company's management makes forward looking statements concerning the Company's expected future operations, performance and other developments. These forward-looking statements are necessarily estimates based upon current information and involve a number of risks and uncertainties. There can be no assurance that such risks and uncertainties, or other factors, will not affect the accuracy of such forward-looking statements. It is impossible to identify all factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those estimated by the Company. They include, but are not limited to, government regulation, managing and maintaining growth, victimization by white-collar offenders and the effects of adverse publicity, litigation, competition and other factors that may be identified from time to time in the Company's announcements.
