FROM THE EDITOR . . . .
Greetings everyone. For those of you who are "old hands" in the
oncho world, you know that this issue of the Greene Sheet is long overdue;
for those of you who are new to this "world", welcome. This
issue retains much of the format of the first two issues. Joe Cook and Jeff
Mecaskey will update you on happenings from the Director's Office and there
is also the usual update on the L3 and serum banks, among other things,
in the "Brief Updates" section compiled by yours truly. Eric
Ottesen describes the happenings on the WHO control program front; for those
of you who don't know, Eric has sadly left us here at the NIH and has taken
up residence in Geneva - well, I suppose our loss is their gain. There
are also articles from Steve Williams who describes the new library and
EST database coming out of his lab at Smith College, and from Sandy Trees
who will update you on the cattle model for a (hopefully) future direction
of oncho vaccine research. Finally, the real "meat" of this issue
of the Greene Sheet are the reviews from our two "vaccinologists",
David Abraham and Richard Lucius. Since it has been fairly long since the
last Greene Sheet and the meeting at Woods Hole, this editor allowed both
of these gents to be rather lengthy in their writing. Aside from updating
everyone on the screens themselves, David describes some of the problems
(and that is truly an understatement for what he and his lab have been through)
with the new L3 collections (thankfully, these problems have now been solved).
This is one reason why the Greene Sheet is so overdue since the screening
process has been held up for quite some time (well it sounds like a good
excuse anyway). Richard offers some very interesting ideas on things we
should all be thinking about when producing and testing antigens, ideas
which he also discussed with a group of investigators in New York in May
(see "Brief Updates"). Both David and Richard have also included
tables showing their results thus far of the antigen trials. Well, that's
about it for now - hope everyone enjoys this latest issue.
Regards to all,
Cathy Steel, Editor