Newsday - June 12, 1992
Laurie Garrett
Scientists have found a common monkey species that can be artificially infected with the human AIDS virus, a discovery that could cut at least two years off the time it takes to test potential vaccines against the virus.
The discovery was reported by researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle and Northwestern University in Chicago, who said they had infected eight pigtail macaques with the human immunodeficiency virus Type I, the strain of AIDS virus responsible for most of the world's pandemic.
"I think this has the potential of being extremely important," said Dr. Wayne Koff, former chief coordinator of the U.S. government's AIDS vaccine development program and now vice president for vaccine research and development at United Biomedical in Hauppauge.
Until now, only chimpanzees could be infected with the human virus. But chimps are an endangered species and very expensive. As a result, potential vaccines have been screened first in monkeys that get SIV, the simian form of acquired immune deficiency syndrome. Only the most promising are then tested in chimpanzees. Even then, chimps do not actually develop AIDS, getting only mildly ill, which may mean their immune response to the virus is so different from humans that vaccine results would be misleading.
In contrast, pigtail macaques are extremely common in southeast Asia, are not an endangered species and relatively inexpensive to purchase and maintain, Dr. William Morton of the University of Washington's Primate Center said in an interview. It is too early to know if they will actually develop AIDS.
"If in fact this is a good model of infection - and we think it is - then the vaccine development group can use this animal model to remove the necessity of developing SIV [monkey AIDS virus] vaccines, testing them in monkeys, and then having to go back and repeat it all for an HIV vaccine," Morton said. That could shave two or more years off the time it takes to develop experimental AIDS vaccines, experts said.
Morton is one of the authors of a research paper describing the discovery. The paper was scheduled for publication July 3 in the journal Science, but the journal released it to the press yesterday, saying the usual embargo had been broken.
Koff said he sees two key advantages to using the macaques for testing.
First, it may allow rapid screening of the more than 10 candidate AIDS vaccines now in human trials and dozens of others in various stages of development.
It also may allow scientists to test the dozens of different strains of HIV-1 that have been found throughout the world to see if some are more infectious than others or cause disease more rapidly.
Eighteen months ago, the Seattle team inoculated two pigtail macaques with HIV-1; both were readily infected. Six months ago another six macaques were inoculated with four different strains of HIV-1; all became infected. The infection was confirmed through a variety of means, including removing the spleen of one of the first test monkeys, revealing massive infection of the organs.
None of the animals has developed AIDS, but it is not expected they would become sick until at least three to five years after infection, Morton said.
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