Stanley Crooke's struggle to perfect a powerful new class of drugs may pay off.
By calculating probabilities and doing extensive lab tests, Crooke surmised that a 20-nucleotide sequence was optimal.
"We can't guarantee anybody that this drug can get to the market, " says Crooke.
Chief Executive StanleyCrookeStanley Crooke, 60, headed drug development at Smithkline Beckman and anti-cancer research at Bristol-Myers Squibb.
In December Crooke landed another win, entering into a three-year collaboration with Amgen to discover new antisense drugs.
If all goes well, Crooke expects to file for regulatory approval in 2003.
"It is the sad fact of this industry that the first phase III trial is rarely perfectly designed, " said Crooke.
Mr Crooke cites the anti-colonial writings of Frantz Fanon with enthusiasm, whereas those of free-market advocates are mocked and dismissed.
But Crooke plowed ahead, embarking on a 53-patient trial combining his lung cancer drug with traditional chemotherapies Carboplatinum and Taxol.
On the conference call this morning, Crooke argued that the data indicated that Affinitak did work, though not as well as expected.
The reason was stated simply by Isis Chief Executive Stanley Crooke on a conference call this morning: "Most drugs fail, " Crooke said.
Crooke says there's a lot of interest already from large pharmaceutical companies in Isis' cholesterol drug, and if it works, 301012 has blockbuster potential.
Like Mr Crooke, Mr Cole is all for open dialogue between America and the Muslim countries and movements Mr Bush treated as implacable enemies.
Early experiments suggested that an antisense drug could precisely target cancer cells, but Crooke was unable to reproduce this nascent work in his SmithKline lab.
Isis was founded in 1989 by Stanley Crooke, the former head of research at SmithKline Beckman, after he saw a technology called antisense that could block genes directly.
Chief Executive Stanley Crooke , 60, headed drug development at Smithkline Beckman and anti-cancer research at Bristol-Myers Squibb (nyse: BMY - news - people ).
At a key cancer conference in May 2001 Crooke announced that the patients on chemo and antisense lived 16 months, compared with 8 months for patients on only chemo.
"We are disappointed that we didn't achieve the regulatory hurdle that we set in this trial, but we are very encouraged by the activity we're seeing with Affinitak, " Crooke said.
How much more persuasive this book would have been if Mr Crooke had curbed his enthusiasm, or been just a bit franker about the blemishes on the movements he admires.
Back then, skeptics really only had one reason for disbelief: Crooke himself, who had a reputation for being too eager to hype experimental medicines and not willing enough to admit their flaws.
Another new organisation called Conflicts Forum, founded by a former British intelligence officer, Alastair Crooke, attempts to serve as an interlocutor between militant Islamist groups, such as Hamas and Hizbullah, and the West.
If you ever doubt that drug development is tough, sit back for a look through the yellowed pages of Forbes Magazine as we chart the long journey Isis, Crooke, and antisense have taken together.
FORBES: After 24 Years Of Struggle, Has Stan Crooke Finally Birthed An Age Of Antisense?
He is a waspish critic of American policy towards the Muslim world under George Bush, but manages to prick Western misconceptions without falling into Mr Crooke's error of taking extremist movements entirely at their own estimation.
And while Crooke deserves a lot of credit for keeping the technology behind mipomersen alive (it targets genes directly instead of blocking the proteins they make) this year he did a great deal to prove the naysayers right.
Crooke's first task, an arduous one, was to find out how big the drug should be to best target RNA. RNA strands stretch thousands of nucleotides long, and there may be only one offender out of 100, 000 different strands floating in a cell at any given time.
If it is approved, Crooke explains, the drug can be used in addition to statins--cholesterol-lowering drugs such as Pfizer 's (nyse: PFE - news - people ) Lipitor and Merck 's (nyse: MRK - news - people ) Zocor--some of the biggest-selling drugs in the world.
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