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About Just out. (Portland, OR) 1983-2013 | View Entire Issue (Feb. 19, 1999)
february 19.1999 * news himps were the big news during opening day of the sixth Confer ence on Retroviruses and Oppor tunistic Infections, held Jan. 31 Discoveries about the simian source of HIV could alter through Feb. 4 in Chicago. U niversity of Alabama at Birmingham doctors' approach to treating the virus by Bob Roehr researcher Dr. Beatrice Hahn believes she has found the animal in which HIV first developed before it was passed to humans. body tissue and too much The identification could be very important damage is done to the immune because chimpanzees are the animals that are system— then the immune sys genetically most similar to humans. Humans tem can be reconstituted in share 98 percent of the same genome, or DNA whole or in part. blueprint. Walker was the first to try T he virus does not appear to be harmful to catching patients immediately the chimpanzees, thus, studying how their after exposure, even before immune systems are able to suppress the virus— seroconversion, when the as well as the genetic differences between immune system produces anti chimps and humans— may offer clues about bodies in the blood that are how to control the virus in humans. detected by the standard HIV “Chimpanzees are naturally infected and do test. not get sick,” says Hahn, who ran the study with Walker’s colleague at Mass an international team of scientists. “T hat gives achusetts G eneral Hospital, us an opportunity to find out how the chim Dr. Eric Rosenberg, insists: panzee handles its infection compared to how “There may he a window of we don’t handle ours.” opportunity to treat people H ahn and her colleagues analyzed the m ito before T-helper cells are lost.” chondrial DNA of HIV-1 and the virus in m on W alker hypothesizes the "Chimpanzees are naturally infected and do not keys and chimps. They found the chimp version window extends from the to he the equivalent of a missing link between point of infection to serocon get sick. That gives us an opportunity to find out the other two better-known forms of the virus. version, then seems to close how the chimpanzee handles its infection compared They concluded the virus had crossed from over the next 90 days. French doctor Brigitte chimps to humans on at least three separate to how we don't handle ours." — Dr. Beatrice Hahn occasions, resulting in the three subgroups of A utran reviewed the growing HIV-1 known as M, N, and O. body of knowledge about the She offered no suggestion as to when this impact of immune reconstitution on oppor ally quit it entirely, only to discover that his tunistic infections. She says there is recovery in virus had inexplicably disappeared. He has might have occurred, but it must have been prior to the 1940s because the virus has been virtually all individuals except those with severe remained free of HIV for two years. thymus damage, which generally occurs in the detected in stored human blood samples dating “I don’t see why others cannot become the very late stage of disease. back that far. Berlin patient,” says Dr. Franco Lori, head of the However, reconstitution “requires long-term Research Institute for G enetic and Human U ntil now, the origins of the HIV-1 virus Therapy at Georgetown University in Washing- have been a mystery, though scientists have long suppression of viral load,” she warns. ton, D.C. suspected simians as the source. I he tentative results of a small human Lori’s team is exploring the idea that it may I experiment offer a glimmer of possibility be possible to wean people away from the he immune system was, not surprisingly, a that the body’s own defense system can be demanding regimen of AIDS medicines without major focus of conference participants. actually curing them. Dr. Bruce Walker is a leading theorist of trained to suppress HIV. immune system reconstitution. The Boston The approach attempts to repeat the success A t first glance, Lori’s theory that therapy of the “Berlin patient,” a German man who must be stopped in order for the patient to get researcher believes that if HIV is caught early stopped and started AIDS therapy and eventu better appears to be counterintuitive. But a enough— before too much virus is “archived” in C himp C hange C T ombard W E number of standard childhood vaccinations adhere to the same principle that the immune system needs more than one exposure to a pathogen in order to develop an effective response. Thus there are two-stage vaccination programs, as is the case with polio vaccine, or periodic “booster” shots of tetanus. Still, Lori cautions this may work only in some circumstances. “Randomized controlled studies need to be done in order to determine the relative contribution of each of the key fac tors,” he says. Robert Schooley, a University of Colorado researcher who helped organize the conference, told reporters: “My concern is that this will be overplayed. It sounds good to patients. W ho wouldn’t want to stop treatment? But the real question is whether you can change the immune response. I worry patients will stop therapy. W henever that happens, in my experience, the virus comes roaring back.” Thus far, Lori has tried the approach on three patients. W hile it’s still too soon to know whether it will work, Lori finds the first few weeks’ results promising because the interval before the virus returns is lengthening. He also reports that, in more aggressive experiments with other primates, the approach seems to keep the virus at bay for good. Conference chairman Dr. Douglas Richman, ^ a senior researcher at the University of C al ifornia at San Diego, says of this year’s gathering: “T he quality of the material is really first class.” O f the 1,600 abstracts submitted for consid eration this year, only 100 were granted time for oral presentation. Richman points to revolutionary new m eth ods of testing that are giving researchers a better understanding of how the immune system works and how it can reconstitute itself under power ful therapies such as protease inhibitors, which hold the virus in check. 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