THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, January 26, 1995 TAG: 9501260369
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: BOSTON LENGTH: Short : 48 lines
One man's HIV infection over a decade ago is giving scientists their first evidence of the safety of an AIDS vaccine that has been considered too dangerous for people.
In a kind of unintended natural experiment, the man caught a genetically weakened form of the AIDS virus. It is virtually identical to the weakened virus used in the experimental vaccine, which works well on monkeys.
Typically, people fall ill within 10 years of contracting HIV. But this man, now 44, appears to be perfectly healthy at least 12 years after getting infected.
About 5 percent of HIV-infected people show no signs of immune system damage more than a decade after catching the virus. Understanding the factors that keep them healthy is a major goal of AIDS research.
The study is the first to show that long-term HIV survival clearly may result from catching a crippled version of the virus.
Certainly, one healthy patient does not prove safety. And it also does not demonstrate whether the vaccine wards off other HIV infections, although the researchers said it may have kept the man from getting more lethal forms of the virus.
Recently, doctors discovered that the man's virus was crippled by a mutation in one of its nine genes. By coincidence, this mutation is identical to the one deliberately engineered into an experimental vaccine for SIV, the monkey form of the AIDS virus.
Scientists showed two years ago that giving monkeys this weakened form of the virus protects them from catching the lethal variety, despite deliberate exposure. Yet it does not make the monkeys sick.
The case of the man who was inadvertently vaccinated was described in today's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine by researchers from the New England Regional Primate Research Center and the University of Massachusetts Medical School.
The search for a human AIDS vaccine has been disappointing. Giving dead fragments of the virus does not appear to stimulate the body enough to ward off infection.
KEYWORDS: AIDS by CNB