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Air
France takes over KLM
Paris: In the first cross-border merger of major
European airlines, Air France has taken over 89 per cent
of the share capital of Dutch carrier KLM for $995 million,
creating Europe's biggest airline with a fleet size of
550. The new airline will also carry the third highest
passenger traffic in the world.
The
Dutch government will continue to hold 51 per cent of
its voting rights in KLM while the French government is
likely to divest its majority stake in Air France soon
as part of its privatisation plan.
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Monoclonal
antibody to block HIV infection
London,UK: Progenics Pharmaceuticals, Inc. has
announced that it has begun phase 1 clinical trials of
a new HIV therapy - a humanized monoclonal antibody that
blocks infection by inhibiting the ability of the virus
to enter healthy cells. PRO 140 belongs to a new class
of drugs, viral-entry inhibitors, which are designed to
prevent HIV (human immunodeficiency virus, the causative
agent of AIDS) from gaining access to cells of the immune
system. Unlike currently approved therapies, PRO 140 blocks
the CCR5 coreceptor, one of the principal portals HIV
uses to enter cells, that was discovered in 1996 by Progenics'
scientists and their collaborators. Because of its novel
mechanism of action, PRO 140 has the potential to be broadly
active against viruses that have acquired resistance to
existing classes of antiretroviral therapies. The announcement
was made at the 4th Annual Fortis Bank Biotechnology Conference
in London.
PRO 140 is a humanized monoclonal antibody designed to
bind CCR5 on immune-system cells and thereby shield the
cells from infection with HIV. PRO 140 is highly specific
in targeting a site on CCR5 that is utilized by HIV without
interfering with the normal function of CCR5. In 1996,
Progenics scientists and their collaborators discovered
that HIV uses CCR5 as a principal portal to gain entry
into and infect the host cell. In order to reproduce,
HIV must enter a cell and incorporate its genetic material
into the cell's DNA, thereby commandeering the host into
producing numerous copies of the virus. These new viruses
are then released into the bloodstream to infect other
cells. Viral-entry inhibitors like PRO 140 are designed
to stem this cycle of infection and reproduction by blocking
virus before it enters a healthy cell, whereas conventional
HIV medications work by inhibiting viral reproduction
only after the virus has infected the host cell.
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IBM
eServer i5 Systems with POWER5
Armonk, USA: IBM has introduced the eServer i5,
the first systems to be powered by IBM's POWER5 microprocessors.
Running i5/OS, the next generation of OS/400, the new
eServer i5 systems provide small and medium-sized businesses
with unprecedented power, flexibility and cost benefits.
Powered by POWER5 microprocessors, the most powerful 64-bit
chips ever built by IBM, the IBM eServer i5 can integrate
and run multiple operating systems simultaneously including
i5/OS, Windows, Linux and AIX 5L. The eServer i5 has the
ability to run AIX 5L alongside i5/OS to consolidate and
manage UNIX solutions. Businesses using the eServer i5
can average up to 40 percent improvement in system price/performance
over previous iSeries systems with comparable prices to
UNIX-based systems for memory, disk and server components.
- The
eServer i5 servers are pre-loaded and tested with an
integrated operating system, i5/OS, that integrates
the base software a business needs, including the industry
standards-based IBM DB2 UDB database. The i5/OS is integrated
with IBM WebSphere - Express, a scalable transaction
engine for dynamic e-business applications.
- The
eServer i5 systems are powered by IBM's next-generation
POWER5 microprocessor, the most advanced 64-bit chip
in the industry. POWER5 features an impressive 276 million
transistors per processor, and is manufactured with
IBM's 0.13-micron copper wiring and SOI (Silicon-on-Insulator)
technologies. In addition to providing communications
acceleration and chip multiprocessing, POWER5 offers
simultaneous multithreading (SMT), which transforms
a single processor core into two logical processors,
as seen by the operating systems and application software.
Since the POWER5 chip has two processor cores, SMT essentially
allows the chip to run four application threads at the
same time, thereby reducing the time it requires to
complete a task.
Businesses
can further simplify their IT environment on the eServer
i5 server with the new support for running Linux on Intel
processor-based Integrated xSeries server. Customers can
reduce infrastructure server costs by managing all of
their Linux and Windows servers together with integrated
storage, security and backup.The IBM eServer i5 will be
available as of June 2004.
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