STRASBOURG, France _ Some 240 registrants from all 12 European Union nations, plus the U.S., Canada, and Japan, converged Tuesday on this French Rhineland city for the first J.-P. Lecocq Conference on Gene Therapy. Co-sponsored by Transg ne S.A. here and INSERM, France's National Research Institute for Science and Medicine, the event commemorates the death in a plane crash in 1992 of Transg ne's first director general, Jean-Pierre Lecocq. He was an internationally acclaimed molecular biologist. Four half-day sessions Wednesday and Thursday will include 27 papers updating viral and non-viral vectors, preclinical and clinical studies and stem cells. These sessions will be chaired, respectively, by four leading U.S. researchers, namely, Dusty Miller, of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle; Inder Verma, of the Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif.; Robert Gallo of the National Institutes Of Health; and Richard Mulligan, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Scientists from Canada, France, Austria, Switzerland, the U.K., The Netherlands and Italy, will present their current research results. "The objective of this first J.-P. Lecocq gene therapy conference," Transg ne's director-general, Bernard Gilly, told BioWorld on Tuesday evening, "is to constitute, and contribute to, an international European forum, where scientific information could circulate among different laboratories, whether public or private companies, coming from all around the world to this European-based conference." Gilly added, "This opportunity for us [at Transg ne] is certain to increase dramatically the number of contracts between us and academic institutions, and serve other companies who come to the conference in exactly the same way." About 70 percent of Transg ne's present activity is dedicated to gene therapy, the firm's CEO said, in these five areas: cystic fibrosis, multiple sclerosis, thalassemia, AIDS and cancer. He confided that the company's first clinical trial, for lung cancer gene therapy, will begin "by the end of the month" at the Gustave-Roussy Institute in Paris. It will enroll 10 patients for a Phase I study (with therapeutic indications as a hopeful by-product) employing initially an interleukin-2 gene in a defective adenovirus vector. The conference opened Tuesday evening with a reception sponsored by the local administrative district. Gilly and the department's vice- president, Andr Kleinmosser, welcomed the conferees. Transg ne has numerous U.S. contacts, Gilly said, most of them at a scientific level. One such is with Ohio State University, which holds the basic patent on retrotransposon vectors. In addition, the company is in collaborative discussions with several American companies. "Transg ne's goal," Gilly said, to which this conference will contribute, "is to go as quickly as we can to the patients with suitable therapies. "What Transg ne is all about, and this is our core business, is to develop vectors for gene transfer. The company now numbers 170 employees, 70 of which are PhDs. The firm is currently finishing its facility for making clinical-grade products for future trials." n

-- David N. Leff Science Editor

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