Dendreon Corp fka DNDNQ

[bioshortsqueezer]

Expression outside prostate was shown only in mice not human, and it has already been shown that mouse PAP has wider tissue distribution (http://www.asco.org/portal/site/ASCO/menuitem.34d60f5624ba07fd506fe310ee37a01d/?vgnextoid=76f8201eb6....

If you read the paper you will see the only evidence they present of PAP outside prostate is in RT-PCR of mouse tissues. There is no second experiment (e.g. by Westerns or Northerns), and no examination of distributions in humans. Also vital information is missing (namely primers used for RT-PCR expression analysis, supposedly in a missing supplementary file that is nowhere to be seen). Overall a rather sloppy hasty effort, not what you would expect from Cancer Research. What is the rush to publish this? Why did the editors not say, more evidence needed, "approvable?"

If you find humans a better model for, um, humans, Cunha et al examined expression of PAP, PSMA, and PSA in human tissues and found PAP to be the most specific (http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S030438350500501X).

Cunha et al. used primers from the EC region in both the secreted and this newly identified TM form of PAP, so it's not that the Cunha primers would have missed the TM form. OTOH they also only did RT-PCR.

Also I did a quick search of human ests and there are no clones of the form predicted in this new paper. This is something the reviewers should have asked for. It could exist, just be in very low abundance. There are mouse ests of TM-PAP though, so it could very well be that this is the form that is widely distributed in the mouse.