Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2000. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
The San Francisco Chronicle - Saturday, July 8, 2000
David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor
Though the treatment is still experimental, researchers who conducted a study of patients at several medical centers believe a protein called interleukin-2 could help increase survival rates for AIDS patients.
The findings will appear in next week's Journal of the American Medical Association, an issue devoted to AIDS that is being published to coincide with the opening tomorrow of the International AIDS Conference in South Africa.
In the past few years, potent combinations of retroviral drugs have made AIDS more manageable by subduing HIV, the virus that causes the disease -- but they are not a cure. Worried about drug-resistant virus strains, researchers tried adding interleukin-2 to the mix.
Interleukin-2 is a protein that regulates the body's immune response. A synthetic version is produced by Chiron Corp. of Emeryville and is federally approved for the treatment of melanoma and kidney cancer, but not yet for AIDS.
The study -- funded by Chiron and led by Dr. Richard T. Davey Jr. of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases -- involved 78 patients in eight medical centers who have been using various combinations of antiviral AIDS drugs. About half also got twice-daily injections of interleukin-2 periodically during the two-year study, which ended in 1998.
Dr. James O. Kahn, associate professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco and a leading AIDS researcher at San Francisco General Hospital, was the senior author of the report in the AMA journal.
"The study is the first randomized controlled trial to demonstrate that adding an immune modulator, in this case IL-2, to anti-retroviral therapy decreases the amount of HIV detectable in the blood," Kahn said.
The AIDS virus was suppressed in almost twice as many of the interleukin patients -- 67 percent versus 36 percent, the study showed.
The researchers also measured levels of disease-fighting white blood cells -- known as CD4 cells -- that are attacked by the AIDS virus. After one year, CD4 levels among the interleukin group climbed an average of 112 percent, compared with 18 percent for the others. The higher the dose, the better the response.
E-mail David Perlman at perlmand@sfgate.com.
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