rrizzo@bbncca.ARPA (Ron Rizzo) (02/09/85)
On NPR's "All Things Considered": Today in New York, the Scientists Institute for Public Information met to gather all valid information on AIDS to give to the press and thus insure the accuracy of news coverage & public knowledge. It was hoped that such a conference and the gravity of the epidemic would overcome medical rivalries between different research teams competing for the discovery of the AIDS mechanism. But, as Mathilde Krim of the Sloan-Kettering Institute said, hopes were dashed when Robert Gallo, discoverer of HTLV-III refused to attend, unable or unwilling to find time in his schedule. The fight to be first to break the AIDS puzzle has caused the creation of three different names for the prospective AIDS pathogen: HTLV-III by Gallo on the East Coast, ARV in San Francisco, & LAV in France. Nevertheless, a French researcher, Jean Paul Chermont of the Pasteur Institute, announced that two years ago he gave a drug he calls HP-23 to a French hemophiliac AIDS patient. Two years later all trace of HTLV-III is gone from the bloodstream of the patient who seems to have fully recovered. HP-23 has not been used on humans before, and is unknown in the US. It is chemically similar to the metal tungsten. Chermont is now administering it to 34 AIDS patients. However, the drug can cause dangerous side effects in the blood system. Apparently, HP-23 kills all of the alleged AIDS virus in the blood- stream. How does it work? When the AIDS virus invades a cell, it must immediately reproduce. It does so by latching on to the cell's genes. HP-23 kills the virus by competing with it: it also latches on to the cell's genes and thus prevents the virus from reproducing. If the virus can't reproduce, it can't spread, & thus AIDS presumably can't develop. However, the scientists pointed out that the drug would not help many AIDS patients in whom the disease is well-advanced: once the immune system is destroyed, the virus often disappears, its damage done. Many AIDS patients reveal no trace of the virus. Thus, the drug would seem to benefit primarily pre- or early AIDS cases. Nobel Laureate David Baltimore of MIT & others present also cautioned people against expecting a vaccine to be forthcoming. Vaccines typi- cally take YEARS to develop and require much research & testing. Ron Rizzo