United Press International - Thursday, December 3, 1998

The finding, the first to describe a gene that speeds up the progression of AIDS, may help drug designers in their search for new treatments for the deadly immune system disease, says the research team from the National Cancer Institute.

In the new study, researchers looked for the genetic trait in both uninfected people at high risk of getting AIDS and those who already had caught the virus.

People with a specific pattern in their DNA, which the scientists called PI, progressed more rapidly from being infected and having no symptoms to having AIDS.

The scientists estimate the gene is present in between 7 percent to 13 percent of the population.

Geneticist Mary Carrington says, "In the first five or six years, those individuals will progress more rapidly by a year or two." She says the gene only has this effect in the early stages of the infection.

The gene appears to play a role in the production of a molecule -- known as CCR5 -- that helps bring the virus into immune system cells. Carrington says the new research shows that "if you play around with CCR5, you're going to affect progression" of AIDS.

CCR5 caused excitement among AIDS researchers two years ago when they observed that some people were protected from the disease if they had defects in the two copies of the gene that produces the molecule.

Even a glitch in one of the two copies of the CCR5 gene could slow down the progression of AIDS, says Carrington.

The gene the scientists are reporting on in the new research is known as a promoter. It does not directly build the CCR5 protein, but it influences how much of it will be produced.

Carrington adds that another team recently published a similar finding in a different scientific journal, which supports the Cancer Institute's work.

The scientists believe that one form of the promoter gene leads to more CCR5 on the cell surface, giving the AIDS virus more doors to enter. But, Carrington says, they still have to prove this theory.

She says new drugs might aim at the promoter as a target, decreasing the production of CCR5 and slowing the disease progression.

Carrington says that people with the mutant form of CCR5 appear to still be protected from getting AIDS, even if they have the PI form of the promoter.

A report issued this week by the United Nations estimates that worldwide about 33.4 million people are infected with the AIDS virus.

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