San Francisco Chronicle (SF) - SATURDAY, July 15, 1995 Edition: FINAL Section: News Page: A1 Word Count: 865
Sabin Russell, Chronicle Staff Writer

This unlikely medical scenario, rooted in the discovery that baboons have an immune system capable of fighting off the virus, could play out as early as this fall if the Food and Drug Administration accepts yesterday's recommendation by an advisory panel.

Once an advisory panel rules, final FDA approval is usually a formality.

"We do not have a written letter in our hands, but we fully expect to have it within a few weeks," said Dr. Steven Deeks, a San Francisco General Hospital AIDS physician who will carry out the experiment. The earliest the procedure could take place is September, he said.

Jeff Getty, an Oakland resident and AIDS activist, is the most likely candidate to be the first to undergo the trans-species bone marrow transplant. About 40 other volunteers are on a waiting list.

The operation is deemed especially risky because it will require doctors to suppress Getty's already-weakened immune system to ensure that his body does not reject the baboon cells.

"This probably will hasten his death, not prevent it," said Dr. Hugh Auchincloss Jr. of Massachusetts General Hospital, a member of the FDA panel.

Yet to Getty, who turned 38 yesterday, the advisory committee decision was the best possible way to celebrate his birthday.

"I am elated," said Getty, who made the study of immunology his hobby after his illness forced him to leave his job as a policy analyst for the University of California at Berkeley.

He said the risk of the experiment is minimal, compared to the likelihood of his death from AIDS, which he has battled for 15 years.

"It's not like I'm jumping off a bridge," he said.

Getty remains bitter, however, that concerns about the experiment raised by the FDA have delayed it -- possibly long enough to count him out. "I'm ready to go now," he said. "I could get sick this summer and knock myself out of this protocol."

The Oakland man attributes yesterday's ruling to his confrontational approach. A member of ACT-UP/Golden Gate, the AIDS patient advocacy organization, Getty mobilized political support after the FDA raised objections to the experiment. He had expected to receive the transplant in April, but the federal agency intervened.

Highest on their list of concerns was that an unknown baboon virus could be transferred to human patients, and they in turn could pass it to other humans -- much as the AIDS virus itself is believed to have originated in monkeys and somehow was transferred to people. The FDA panel made its recommendations after a two-day meeting on the topic in Bethesda, Md. Testimony included tearful pleas from Getty's mother and sisters. "Don't take this hope away from him," asked his mother, Susan Getty. "Unless you do something now, he will be dead."

Under the stringent new restrictions recommended by the panel, Getty will have to agree to practice safe sex for the rest of his life -- a practice already urged on anyone infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

Deeks, of San Francisco General Hospital, said doctors hope that patients will be able to live with a strong immune system just like the small percentage of "long-term survivors" who have been infected with HIV for nearly 15 years without showing signs of disease.

Getty learned of the experiment a year ago, after it was proposed by Dr. Suzanne Ildstad, a University of Pittsburgh transplant specialist. Ildstad theorized that because baboons do not get AIDS, a transplant of a small number of baboon bone marrow cells may confer that immunity to someone infected by the virus.

Ildstad and Deeks collaborated on a plan to transplant into a patient with advanced AIDS a broth made of baboon stem cells -- the rare but vital cells that later divide into the many different blood components that make up the body's disease-fighting defenses.

Under ordinary circumstances, the patient's own blood cells and the baboon cells would identify each as foreign invaders, and mount a vigorous immunological battle to wipe each other out. But Ildstad, during work to find ways for humans to accept organs from animals, has discovered a second line of blood cells that appear to mediate a truce between the warring camps. She hopes that if doctors infuse these "facilitating cells" along with the stem cells, the patient will accept the baboon immune system as his own.

Getty would become, in medical terms, a "chimera," with an immune system that is 90 percent human and 10 percent baboon. Doctors hope that 10 percent would carry whatever unknown component exists in baboon blood that protects the primates against the AIDS virus.

Both Getty and his doctors recognize that the chances for success are exceedingly slim.

"It's a long shot. It's a moon shot," said Getty. "But if the FDA were in charge of the space program, Neil Armstrong would never have walked on the moon."

CAPTION: PHOTO AIDS patient Jeff Getty may be first to get this type of transplant/BY LACY ATKINS/ASSOCIATED PRESS

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