San Francisco Chronicle (SF) - FRIDAY, July 28, 1995 Edition: FINAL Section: News Page: A12 Word Count: 569
Charles Petit, Chronicle Science Writer

Gallo took part in a high-wattage panel at Moscone Center yesterday that included Dr. Luc Montagnier, the French co-discoverer of the human immunodeficiency virus, Dr. David Baltimore, a Nobel prize-winning immunologist at MIT, and other luminaries in the scientific struggle to understand AIDS.

They were in the city for the Ninth Annual Congress of Immunology, which has attracted more than 7,000 scientists from around the world to discuss an immense range of immunology issues, from common allergy medications to the most arcane biochemical details of how cells fight disease.

GALLO RESIGNING POST

Gallo recently announced that after 30 years he is resigning his post at the National Cancer Institute near Washington to help set up the Institute for Human Virology at the University of Maryland in Baltimore, where gene therapy against AIDS is high on the agenda.

Within a year, if laboratory and animal tests go well, Gallo said he expects to begin tests in people to try to add new genes to white blood cells that are attacked fiercely by HIV to make them less palatable to the insidious virus.

One strategy will be to add instructions to human cells so that, if an HIV virus invades, antibodies are automatically produced and the virus is unable to multiply. Another will be to give human cells the ability to manufacture large numbers of "decoy" proteins, which would look like parts of the cell the virus usually uses to reproduce itself. The decoys would thus lure the virus away from its usual avenues of attack.

"There are many, many things to try," Gallo said. "The list is almost endless. The crucial thing in this research and others is to find ways to stop the virus from replicating."

NO IMMINENT BREAKTHROUGH

But Gallo, Montagnier and other panel members including Dr. Warner Greene, director of UC San Francisco's Gladstone Institute of Virology at San Francisco General Hospital, cautioned that there is no sign yet of an imminent breakthrough.

"What is important is that treatments for HIV start immediately, as soon as infection is known," said Montagnier, of the Pasteur Institute in Paris. He typified a growing consensus that the best way to slow the virus is with fast treatment with multiple medications, even if none is terribly good yet.

Although many vaccine strategies are being tested, Baltimore said, "nothing on the horizon at the moment has the potential . . . of being a good vaccine." Ten years ago, he said, he organized a federal HIV vaccine review panel. It concluded that such a preventive was five or 10 years off. "Here we are 10 years later, and it is still 10 years away."

Despite the slow pace, Gallo said, steady progress is occurring. He said the situation resembles a disease he worked with in the 1960s, childhood leukemia. At the time, it was incurable and almost always fatal. Today, most cases are cured. "But there were no headlines saying one day there was a treatment," he said. "It happened gradually."

CAPTION: PHOTO `There are many many things to try. The list is almost endless' -- DR. ROBERT GALLO, co-discoverer of HIV/BY JOHN O'HARA/THE CHRONICLE

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