San Francisco Chronicle - Monday, December 1, 1997 - Page A17
David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor

The institute will link clinical researchers, basic scientists and community prevention workers in a continuing collaboration involving some $45 million a year and 1,000 investigators throughout the UCSF system, according to Thomas Coates, the institute's director.

Occasion for the institute's official launch is World AIDS Day, which the United Nations hopes will bolster prevention campaigns, increase research and encourage more widespread distribution of powerful new AIDS drugs.

In a public program at UCSF today at 2 p.m., Dr. Peter Piot, chief of the U.N.'s AIDS agency, will describe the United Nation's future efforts to curb the uncontrolled epidemic, while research leaders in the UCSF institute will report on several new programs now under way and several that are already showing success.

In one report, Dr. Karen Beckerman will disclose that in the Bay Area, the use of the drug AZT for women during pregnancy and delivery has meant that every one of 56 HIV-infected mothers under treatment with the drugs has delivered a baby wholly free of infection.

A new experimental program at San Francisco General Hospital, known as the "Options Project," offers early anti-viral drug treatment for people who have been infected with HIV for less than six months and who have not developed disease symptoms.

So far, doctors in the project have treated 37 of those people with different drug combinations and all are doing well with no treatment failures, according to Dr. Frederick Hecht, the project director, who will report details during the UCSF event.

World AIDS Day events today are coming just as the United Nations has disclosed that its recent figures on the epidemic's human impact far underestimated the numbers of people infected with the AIDS virus.

More than 30 million people worldwide are now infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, according to the United Nations' World Health Organization, and 16,000 more people are being infected every day. More than 40 million children will be orphaned by the year 2010, new United Nations estimates predict.

At UCSF, the new enterprise will function, in effect, as an "institute without walls," Coates said.

Some institute researchers are seeking new AIDS drugs, others are seeking new ways to prevent high-risk behavior, others are examining the increasingly dangerous phenomenon of drug resistance, while still others are probing the basic biology of the AIDS virus.

Solving all the unanswered questions posed by the many AIDS-related illnesses and the virus that triggers them demands a "deeper level of collaboration," Coates said. "The important answers will come at the interface of the sciences, and it's clear we can't answer clinically important questions without bringing people together."
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