The Associated Press; Thursday, December 15, 1988.

The test was cleared Tuesday by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Its maker, Worcester-based Cambridge Bioscience, said it should be on the market in a few weeks.

"This technical advance should help make testing available to all who want to be tested," FDA Commissioner Frank Young said in Washington. "It will also be particularly useful in remote areas of the world that lack the facilities for earlier approved tests."

The results of those earlier tests -- now the mainstay of AIDS screening -- frequently are not available for weeks.

Gary Buck, chairman of Cambridge Bioscience, said the new procedure, the Recombigen HIV-1 Latex Agglutination Test, should be useful anywhere that quick results are important.

"The big boon is that it's fast, and it will be useful in Third World countries and places where lab facilities might be less than ideal in order to screen large populations in a rapid, simple way," said Dr. Paul Skolnik, a virologist at New England Medical Center.

The test is 99.6 percent accurate, Buck said. But the company recommends that -- as with the current screening test, called the enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, or ELISA -- blood samples that are positive for the AIDS virus be confirmed by a time-consuming backup test called the Western blot.

The speed of the Recombigen means that those who are free of the virus are likely to be given the good news immediately, Buck said. But those who are probably infected will be told that further testing is necessary.

Like other AIDS tests, this one checks for AIDS infection by spotting antibodies to the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, which causes AIDS.

"All of the present (ELISA) tests require, under the best of circumstances, three to five hours," Buck said. "This test requires three to five minutes."

Unlike the ELISA, which requires labs and technicians, the new test can be given under crude conditions where even refrigeration is lacking. Experts believe that this should make the test useful in places like Africa, where acquired immune deficiency syndrome is widespread and where blood is frequently not screened before transfusions.

Teena Lerner, an analyst at Shearson Lehman Hutton in New York, said the test also may be given in many settings in the United States, such as venereal disease clinics.

"In a lot of the voluntary testing centers, there is a huge proportion of people who don't come back to find the answer," she said. "The ones who are most likely to be positive are the ones who are most likely to chicken out."

CAPTION: PHOTO Gary Buck shows AIDS test (--NATL)

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