Chicago Tribune (CT) - WEDNESDAY December 1, 1993 Edition: NORTH SPORTS FINAL Section: NEWS Page: 1 Word Count: 918
Peter Gorner and Michael L. Millenson, Tribune Staff Writers. Tribune intern Rich Dvorak in the Washington bureau contributed to this report

Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala outlined formation of a new federal task force on AIDS drug development at a news conference held at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md.

The idea is to speed discoveries from the lab bench to the bedside by combining the talents of top researchers and regulators at the NIH and the Food and Drug Administration with senior representatives from the pharmaceutical industry and community activists.

"It is time to refocus and re-energize our best minds for a concerted attack on this killer," Shalala said. "Success cannot be guaranteed but history will judge us harshly if we fail to give it our best shot."

Some scientists and AIDS activists were skeptical.

Dr. Judith Feinberg, a former government AIDS researcher who works at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, cautioned against expecting too much from yet another government commission.

"What's needed is to continue research to unlock the biology of the virus at the earliest stages of infection," she said. "That's where we'll find clues on how to ward off the disease and treat people early."

An estimated 1 million Americans are infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which causes AIDS. An additional 340,000 people have contracted the full-blown disease, of whom about 200,000 have died.

More than 70 pharmaceutical companies are working on medicines and vaccines to combat AIDS and its complications. But Shalala acknowledged that the FDA has not received a single application yet for a drug to fight HIV.

"No matter how much we shorten the pipeline, we cannot achieve our goal unless we start filling that pipeline with promising compounds," Shalala said. "That is the purpose of the new panel."

Noting that Wednesday is World AIDS Day, an annual observance to evaluate society's response to the spread of the disease, she pointed out that the Clinton administration and Congress have boosted the AIDS research budget by 21 percent this year to $1.3 billion.

No disease has been more politicized in recent years, and critical reviews of the new proposal were quick to appear.

Wayne Turner, an AIDS activist at the news conference, called the task force "more smoke and mirrors" and pointed out that there already have been two national commissions on AIDS in earlier admnistrations.

"Where's the Manhattan Project? Where's the action?" Turner challenged Shalala.

"Let me be clear," she replied. "This is not just another government panel appointed to study the issue and write a report that gathers dust. . . . We see this as taking action."

Other activists were encouraged. "It's really significant," said Derek Hodel of the AIDS Action Council. "It represents a level of commitment that we haven't yet seen from the federal government."

Shalala named her top health deputy, Dr. Philip R. Lee, the head of the Public Health Service, to chair the National Task Force on AIDS Drug Development. She said she will solicit nominations to the 14 other seats on the task force over the next month.

Lee said, "Too often in the past, needed links have been missing or relationships have been adversarial, resulting in unnecessary duplication of efforts or potential drugs not being developed and evaluated as rapidly as they might."

All potential therapies for AIDS follow roughly similar strategies. Researchers pick certain points in the reproductive cycle of HIV and try to attack them-either with drugs, vaccines or, most recently, genes-in an effort to interfere with the production of infectious virus that spreads to other cells. Drugs such as AZT, DDI and DDC, for instance, inhibit the key enzyme (reverse transcriptase) that HIV needs to convert its genetic material and eventually take over the genes of host cells.

Attempts to develop vaccines, a well-established means of controlling viral infections, have been hampered for several reasons: HIV can be transmitted from cell to cell, it mutates too quickly for the body to mount a response, and it kills the very sentry cells that would detect its presence.

Many researchers are looking to gene therapy for a breakthrough. Some 58 human gene therapy experiments have been approved by federal regulators since 1990. However, only four relate to AIDS and none is therapeutic, according to Dr. Nelson Wivel, director of NIH's Office of Recombinant DNA Activities.

"Gene therapy still is a cumbersome technology, not something that neighborhood hospitals in Chicago would want to try," Wivel said. "If a gene-based approach proved efficient for AIDS patients, scaling it up would be no mean feat."

Unlike diseases that affect specific tissues and could be correctable by replacement of a single gene, AIDS presents formidable obstacles for gene therapy.

Treatment, in order to have a chance, would have to start early, before the virus had taken hold of the immune system. Several test-tube approaches have reduced the ability of the virus to reproduce, although long-term shutdowns have been difficult to achieve.

CAPTION: Photo: This AIDS Awareness postage stamp will go on sale nationwide starting Wednesday in conjunction with activities marking World AIDS Day. AP photo. Graphic (color): AIDS in the U.S. An estimated 1 million to 1.5 million Americans have contracted HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Since 1981, 201,775 Americans have died from the disease. Source: Centers for Disease Control, National Institute for Health, Statistical Abstract of the United States. Chicago Tribune/Ken Marshall.

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