ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, February 25, 1997 TAG: 9702250092
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: B-6 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: LONDON
SOURCE: Associated Press
THE SCOTTISH COMPANY that broke new barriers by cloning a sheep experienced a price surge of 15.7 percent.
Investors on Monday pushed up the share price of a young Scottish biotechnology company that cloned a sheep, but it remains unclear whether the science can go from making sheep to making money.
While dazzling as a technological leap and a conundrum for ethicists, the practical applications of using adult mammals to make infant copies seem less impressive.
``It's more of a scientific event than anything with investment implications,'' said Hemant Shah of HKS & Co., an independent drug industry research firm in Warren, N.J.
Cloning could let companies precisely copy animals carrying proteins valuable in drug-making, or perfectly duplicate others, such as cattle that yield good beef.
But that can already be done with a fair amount of precision, according to analysts who weren't sure if it would be wise to wager too much money on PPL Therapeutics, based outside Edinburgh.
PPL worked with the Roslin Institute, also near Edinburgh, to clone a lamb, named Dolly, from an adult sheep. It was the first time an adult mammal had been cloned and has raised questions about the possibility of cloning humans.
A 15.7 percent jump in the stock of PPL in London was seen largely as a knee-jerk reaction to the headlines around the world of the technological breakthrough.
Anybody who had put money into PPL Therapeutics shortly after it went public last spring would be a loser at present, since the the stock has slid from a price of around 500 pence ($8.15) to 387.5 pence ($6.32) even after Monday's climb.
The most likely commercial application for the cloning technology would involve copying animals that contain proteins for drug-making in their milk - a process where control of the elements is of vital importance.
Although the cloning pioneered by PPL Therapeutics could allow perfect copying of the animal, other firms, such as Genzyme Transgenics Corp. of Cambridge, Mass., are already doing something quite similar by placing the protein-producing genes they want into new goats.
The PPL Therapeutics process is ``cleaner'' with little or no risk of damaging the desired genes, but it represents just a step ahead of similar projects rather than a huge leap, according to Carl Gordon, an analyst at Mehta and Isaly, a New York group that researches health-care investments.
Until Dolly was created, scientists had thought that a whole mammal could only be regenerated from reproduction cells - not ones that were specialized for some other use. The cells used to make Dolly were taken from a ewe's udder.
LENGTH: Medium: 58 linesby CNB