Chicago Tribune (CT) - FRIDAY December 23, 1988 Edition: FINAL Section: NEWS Page: 4 Word Count: 575
Jon Van, Science writer

Until now, the virus that produces acquired immune deficiency syndrome has infected or caused symptoms only in humans. Some chimpanzees have been infected, but they haven't developed symptoms and in any case are a rare endangered species.

In two separate reports published in Friday's edition of the journal Science, researchers describe successfully infecting mice with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).

This should be a major advance for AIDS research because it likely will give scientists a means of testing new therapies and vaccines in animals. It also should provide them with new insights into how the virus infects cells and help them find new ways to thwart viral reproduction.

Scientists can do a host of things to lab animals infected with HIV, such as administering potentially dangerous drugs or studying viral activity in their cell tissue, that would be unethical in human patients.

Until now, the lack of a suitable animal model that can be infected with the virus has been a major drag on AIDS research.

The news in Science is especially encouraging because it documents two different approaches to infecting mice with AIDS, a development that should give researchers flexibility for designing future experiments.

A team at Stanford University Medical Center reported AIDS infection of a mouse strain that has no immune system, but into which human immune cells have been implanted. The successful implantation of human immunity into these mice, reported three months ago, had raised hopes that a mouse model for AIDS was on the horizon.

That hope was realized with Friday's announcement.

Another group of scientists at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases produces AIDS-infected mice by injecting complete copies of HIV genetic code into mouse eggs and then implanting those eggs into female mice for gestation and birth.

Of 64 animals born from this process, seven contained complete copies of HIV genetic material in all their cells.

These animals, called "transgenic mice," showed no signs of illness, but some of their offspring did exhibit symptoms that are similar to those caused by AIDS in humans.

These mice died of AIDS-like disease.

The full extent to which the two approaches of infecting mice with AIDS will be useful to scientists isn't yet known because the researchers' prime goal was to demonstrate only that mice can be infected with the virus.

At Stanford, for example, there was no sign that the mice developed AIDS or its symptoms because the experiment was terminated after eight weeks so that scientists could study infected cells in the dead mice.

"By limiting the study to eight weeks, we cannot yet predict whether the mice would get the full AIDS syndrome," said Dr. Irving Weissman professor of cancer and pathology at Stanford. "It's too early to tell. This experiment wasn't designed to mimic AIDS (as seen) in human patients exactly."

In the Stanford mice, infection was accomplished by injecting the virus directly into the human immune tissue carried by the animals rather than through sexual intercourse or infection of the blood stream, as are the common infection routes in humans.

At both labs, work with the mice was carried on in high-security areas to guard against infection of lab workers with HIV and against escape from the lab by AIDS infected mice.

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