Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1998. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
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United Press International; Monday February 2 5:44 PM EST
Ed Susman, UPI Science News
Jean-Pierre Sommadossi, professor of clinical pharmacology at the University of Alabama-Birmingham, suggests at the 5th Conference on Retrovirus and Opportunistic Infections in Chicago, that AZT's own chemical actions could be interfering with the mechanisms that attack AIDS and may be one reason why the AIDS virus becomes resistant to AZT and other drugs in combination therapies. Sommadossi tells United Press International, "These studies raise questions about AZT; they don't answer the questions.'' He says that before people give up on using AZT controlled, scientists will need to determine what role AZT plays in AIDS treatment.
In his study, Sommadossi found that when patients infected with HIV are treated with AZT, subsequent treatment with another drug in the same class, d4T, the virus level in the patient's blood is reduced by about 60 to 70 percent on average.
When d4T is delivered to patients without having previous AZT treatment, the reduction is more than 95 percent _ often to levels at which no virus can be detected by standard scanning methods. The studies were supported by Bristol-Myers Squibb of Princteton, N.J., the maker of d4T. Glaxo Wellcome of London markets AZT.
Sommadossi says it appears from his studies which involve 19 patients that AZT interferes with phosphorylation _ the process in which the certain anti-retroviral drugs release their virus-fighting potential. He says this interference could explain why combinations of AZT with other drugs such as 3TC and ddI fail to show a more robust reaction in fighting the disease.
Other studies at the conference challenge Sommadossi's results. Dr. Douglas Richman of the University of California, San Diego, and chairman of the conference's scientific program committee, acknowledged the controversy of the studies on AZT. But Richman says, "Dr. Sommadossi's data seems compelling.''
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