Institute in Paris Treating Hudson Has No AIDS Cure
A leading scientist at a French research institute said Thursday that Rock Hudson’s decision to be treated for AIDS in Paris should not cause patients with the lethal disease to assume that treatment there is better than in the United States.
“We have no more treatment than any other institute,” said Dr. Luc Montagnier, chief of virology at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and discoverer--together with an American team--of the virus that causes AIDS.
“We have no breakthrough,” he added.
There has been speculation that Hudson went to Paris to be treated at the Pasteur Institute with a drug called HPA23 that was developed there and is available only as part of research trials.
But Montagnier said he knows nothing about Hudson’s receiving the experimental drug. He indicated that a number of Americans with AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) are going to Paris because they have heard that HPA23 blocks the reproduction of the AIDS virus, which has killed half of its 12,000 known victims in the United States.
Montagnier said HPA23 “can diminish the number of infected lymphocytes (white blood cells),” but added that, so far, the drug has not stopped the progression of the disease if the patient had full-blown AIDS before treatment began. He said it is “too early” to tell what effect the drug has if treatment is begun soon after initial infection.
“If they have an incurable disease, they will do anything,” he said. “We explain to them that the treatment is no better in Paris than in Los Angeles or San Francisco. . . . I wish they would not flock to Pasteur.”
The French scientist spoke at a scientific meeting in Costa Mesa dealing with the most recent ad vances in the experimental treatment of AIDS using antiviral drugs. The sessions, which conclude today, are sponsored by Viratek Inc., a subsidiary of the ICN Pharmaceuticals.
ICN manufactures an experimental antiviral drug called ribavirin that has just undergone initial human trials at The New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center in New York City to determine its toxicity and optimal dosage. The trial involved 23 healthy homosexuals with symptoms such as enlarged lymph nodes indicating that they are so-called pre-AIDS patients and are likely to get the disease.
Dr. Richard Roberts, professor of medicine at Cornell, said that when given to pre-AIDS patients at the optimal dosage, ribavirin appears to reduce the number of viruses and to enhance the ability of the patient’s immune system to function.
Ribavirin cannot be obtained legally in the United States. It is licensed in a number of other countries, including most of Latin America, for use against other viral diseases. Dr. Roberts Smith, vice president of the company’s Nucleic Acid Institute, said the firm is “not happy” with reports that AIDS patients are taking ribavirin that was purchased outside the United States.
Can Be Toxic
At high doses, the drug is toxic, he said.
Ribavirin, HPA23 and two other drugs called suramin and isoprinosine are among the half-dozen experimental compounds currently in various stages of study in the laboratory or in patients.
In an interview, Dr. Karl M. Johnson, former chief of the special pathogens branch of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, and currently a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and Hygiene, indicated that researchers are only at the beginning of their search for a cure for AIDS.
The preliminary tests done so far have been for relatively short periods of time. It is not known whether prolonged use might cause intolerable toxic effects, he said.
Effect Uncertain
If a drug is able to do its job without unbearable toxicity, it still must be learned whether the drug is capable of preventing new cells from becoming infected by keeping the virus suppressed for long periods of time.
Even if that does happen, it may be necessary to reconstitute the patient’s immune system if the disease process has destroyed it beyond repair, Johnson said.
One means of doing that is to give the patient a bone marrow transplant, a complex and expensive procedure.
