Wall Street Journal - April 24, 1984
Marilyn Chase, Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

Although a cure for the mysterious and fatal syndrome is still acknowledged to be years away, Margaret Heckler, secretary of Health and Human Services, said the discovery of the virus will allow development of a blood test to screen the supplies in U. S. blood banks within six months, and could lead to the creation of a vaccine against AIDS in two to three years.

Officials acknowledged that yesterday's announcement doesn't promise any immediate relief for the thousands of AIDS sufferers in the U. S. But Dr. Robert Gallo of the National Cancer Institute said he plans to work with a Philadelphia research group toward a "possible direct therapy."

AIDS is a collapse of the body's immune system that leaves its victims unable to fight off certain types of rare cancer, pneumonia or other fatal infections. Striking mainly homosexual men, Haitian immigrants and drug addicts, it has killed 1,758 of its 4,087 U. S. victims since the syndrome was identified in 1981.

As expected, the virus was identified as the third member of the Human T-cell Leukemia Virus family called HTLV-III. Dr. Gallo, who is chief of tumor-cell biology at the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health, pioneered the work in concert with researchers at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.

"We believe we have the agent at hand," the scientist said at a news conference yesterday at the Department of Health and Human Services.

Dr. Gallo's team first identified the HTLV family of viruses in the late 1970s. These viruses also are responsible for an aggressive form of cancer in Africa, the Caribbean and Japan.

Dr. Gallo said that blood samples of 43 of 49 patients with AIDS tested positively for HTLV-III, while 11 of 14 patients with "pre-AIDS" syndrome, including chronically swollen glands, tested positively. However, such sample groups are small, and he cautioned that he still is collecting data.

Dr. Gallo's findings were published this week in the May 1 issue of the journal Science.

Dr. Gallo tried to defuse an international controversy that has arisen in recent days over a competing claim published April 7 in the British journal Lancet, by a group of French researchers that they had isolated the true AIDS virus. Dr. Luc Montagnier and a group at the Pasteur Institute named their candidate virus LAV, for "lymphadepopathy-associated virus," so-called for the characteristic swollen glands of AIDS patients.

"There never has been any controversy between us," Dr. Gallo said of the French team. "We are, in fact, collaborators." Dr. Gallo also repeated the view of many U. S. scientists that HTLV-III and LAV may simply be different names for the same virus.

But even while sharing the spotlight, Dr. Gallo contended that his work has the edge because he has been able to mass-produce the virus protein using gene-splicing techniques. This is useful both in research and in the later development of diagnostic tests and vaccines.

U. S. health bureaucrats clearly also were eager to make an early claim for the U. S. medical sleuths in unraveling the AIDS mystery, a contest in which many observers believe a Nobel Prize may be at stake.

Mrs. Heckler, for example, said that the U. S. had filed a patent application covering aspects of Dr. Gallo's work related to developing a blood-screening test for AIDS. The U. S. Public Health Service would own such a patent, if it is issued.

Dr. Gallo said he is continuing his studies of transfusion recipients known to have received blood donated by people from high-risk groups for AIDS. Transfusion AIDS cases, while in the minority, are critical to unraveling the disease because blood sources are well-documented and, hence, potential sources of infection are easier to trace.

Though he briefly described his plans to collaborate with Philadelphia researchers on a "possible direct therapy," he tried to keep the lid on a growing elation that led federal health officials to describe yesterday's announcement in such terms as "magnificent" and "miraculous."

"It obviously isn't in the interest of the scientist to make a fast prediction of results," he said.

While other AIDS experts were excited about the possible discovery of an AIDS virus, they quickly cautioned that the advance wouldn't help AIDS victims soon.

"It's a terrific scientific development," said Dr. Henry Wilke Murray, chief of infectious diseases at New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center in New York where many AIDS patients are treated. "But I don't know how it is going to be any immediate help to gay men who already have AIDS or the pre-AIDS syndrome." Discovery of an AIDS virus may help explain how the disease is transmitted but doesn't provide any clues on treatment of the disease, he said.

Ultimately, researchers will have to overcome what may be major technical problems in making an effective, safe vaccine from a virus that seems capable of causing cancer. Proving the safety of such a vaccine could pose a formidable problem since scientists have never tried to develop a vaccine using a possible human cancer virus. The testing of any such vaccine may be prolonged in both animals and, later, humans, because the incubation period for AIDS apparently can be as long as two years.

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