PHILADELPHIA, Aug. 22, 2012 — Like recruiters pitching
military service to a throng of people, scientists are developing drugs to
recruit disease-fighting proteins present naturally in everyone’s blood in
medicine’s war on infections, cancer and a range of other diseases. They
reported on the latest advances in this new approach here today at the 244th
National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society, the world’s
largest scientific society.
David Spiegel, M.D., Ph.D., who heads one of the major
research teams developing “antibody-recruiting molecules” (or ARMs), said that
the approach is a response to the old and seemingly impossible dream of identifying
“magic bullets” for wide-ranging diseases. Antibodies are components of the
immune defense system that latch onto microbes and other foreign material in
the body and mark them for destruction.