Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1984. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Wall Street Journal - July 1, 1984
Marilyn Chase, Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal
The announcement rekindles competition between French and U. S. scientists racing to find both cause and cure for the syndrome, which wipes out the body's immunity to disease.
Genetic Systems said its test will be used to screen blood products for LAV, the virus identified by a French researcher, Dr. Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute, as a likely cause of the syndrome. The disease most often strikes homosexual men, drug addicts, Haitian immigrants and recipients of blood transfusions.
LAV stands for lymphadenopathy-associated virus, for the swollen glands that accompany the disease. LAV is believed identical or very similar to HTLV-III, a virus identified in April as a "probable" cause of AIDS by Dr. Robert Gallo of the National Cancer Institute, a unit of the National Institutes of Health.
Word of the U. S-French collaboration follows by two weeks an announcement that the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services had licensed five companies to develop a blood screening test to look for HTLV-III, a virus that belongs to the Human T-Cell Leukemia Virus family. U. S. government spokesmen estimate that the tests will be ready for marketing by early next year, and will have a $100 million market.
The French-American partnership, however, claims its test enjoys patent priority over the U. S. test. The Pasteur Institute applied for a world-wide patent in September 1983 and assigned patent rights on an exclusive basis to the joint venture. Dr. Gallo's group patented its findings this spring.
Robert Nowinski, president of Genetic Systems, called the earlier patent filing date "one of our principal advantages."
However, Dr. Gallo, in a telephone interview, responded impatiently to the Seattle company's claim. "Let them bark in the wind," he said. "Genetic Systems is interested in money. I'm not." Dr. Gallo's group this spring patented a method for mass producing the virus. Any patent covering Dr. Gallo's work would be owned by the U. S. Public Health Service. Subsequently, the Nowinski group said it has devised a different method for mass production of the virus.
The U. S. -French joint venture would involve Genetic Systems and Pasteur Institute Productions, a company owned by the Institute and Sanofi, a French pharmaceutical concern.
Under the joint venture, Genetic Systems will manufacture and market the test exclusively in the U. S. and Canada. Pasteur Institute Productions will manufacture and market the test in Common Market countries.
Separately, the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta announced results of a continuing study suggesting exposure to the AIDS virus in the target population is much broader than originally believed.
The joint study by the CDC and the San Francisco Public Health Department showed that exposure to the AIDS virus LAV among a sample group of the city's homosexual men had surged to 55% in 1984 from about 1% in 1980. The study analyzed frozen blood samples taken from men who were patients at the city's venereal disease clinic between 1978 and 1980, and then called about 200 of those men back this year for further blood tests.
Dr. Harold Jaffe, chief of epidemiology for the CDC's AIDS Activities unit, cautioned that the information was very new, and its ramifications not fully understood.
However, he said that the findings bolster the belief "that this is a new virus, and that exposure was uncommon before 1978."
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