Subject: Promising Results in Research on AIDS Based on False Assumption, Briton Says 
Date: Published: 10/3/91 (81 lines)
Source:  Wall Street Journal.  Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc. 

    Technology & Medicine:
    Promising Results in Research on AIDS
    Based on False Assumption, Briton Says
    ----
    By Laurence Hooper
    Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

    LONDON -- In a possible blow to efforts to develop an AIDS
 vaccine, a British researcher said some encouraging
 experimental results were based on a false assumption.
    James Stott, a senior scientist in an AIDS research
 program sponsored by the British government, said he had
 found that laboratory monkeys that appeared to develop
 immunity to a simian version of the acquired immune
 deficiency syndrome hadn't actually responded to a trial
 vaccine, as had been assumed.  Instead, the monkeys reacted to
 the human cells used to make the vaccine, he asserted.
    Rather than producing antibodies to the AIDS-like disease,
 Dr. Stott said, the monkeys had produced antibodies to the
 foreign human cells.  The confusion arose because the
 antibodies that were developed against the human cells also
 reacted against the simian virus.
    The implication, right or wrong, that the monkeys could
 produce antibodies against an AIDS-like virus without being
 infected by the virus throws a cloud over many AIDS vaccine
 experiments in monkeys.  Many laboratories will now have to
 recheck their experiments to make sure such a mistake hadn't
 been made.
    In some instances, experiments may have to be redone at
 considerable cost.  Monkeys are far more expensive than rats
 and mice to maintain in the laboratory.  In a vaccine
 experiment it may take many monkeys and two to three years or
 even longer to determine whether an experimental vaccine is
 effective in protecting monkeys against the simian version of
 AIDS.  
    Other areas of AIDS-vaccine research, especially those
 using vaccines produced in different ways, probably aren't
 affected by Dr. Stott's discovery.  Several AIDS researchers
 said the importance of the false assumption couldn't be
 gauged until it was known how many people had made it.  And
 they said a single report, even from a credible source such
 as Dr. Stott, shouldn't lead to pessimism about AIDS
 research.
    The report appears in today's issue of Nature, a British
 scientific journal.  In an interview, Dr. Stott defended the
 continuing importance of his experiments, and noted that his
 monkey vaccine might still work if it were produced in a
 different way -- and might even be working to some extent
 already.  But he conceded that he hadn't yet completed testing
 either of those theories.
    At a minimum, Dr. Stott's discovery throws a shadow over
 work under way in at least 15 research centers in Europe and
 the U. S., where scientists have been infecting monkeys with
 simian immunodeficiency virus, or SIV, which is similar to
 the virus that causes AIDS in human beings.
    The monkeys usually are inoculated with trial vaccines
 that, until now, had been thought to work because they
 contained "dead," or inactivated, SIV -- a common way to
 produce vaccines.  Such a protection mechanism would suggest
 that a human vaccine in turn might be produced with dead HIV,
 the AIDS-causing human immunodeficiency virus.
    However, Dr. Stott's questionable experiment isn't the
 only problem troubling prospects for a human vaccine
 fashioned from dead virus.  The risk that such a vaccine might
 accidentally contain some live HIV has long convinced many
 researchers that such an approach is far too dangerous to use
 for purposes of mass immunization.
    Dr. Stott conceded that his discovery was a setback for
 AIDS research.  But he said he hoped "it may turn out to be a
 step back to a position from which we can see things
 differently, and hopefully more clearly."
    ---
    Jerry E. Bishop in New York contributed to this article.

[This article is made available here by Dow Jones Co. for the
 personal and non-commercial use of callers to this bbs, in the
 hope that it will be of some help to those who are suffering
 from the disease and others who are seeking to help them.]