$100 Million Awarded for AIDS Research : Program Could Enroll 1,000 Patients in Tests Within Six Months

The Health and Human Services Department announced Monday that the federal government will pour $100 million into a major nationwide research program to search for drugs effective against AIDS.

The awards represent the largest single amount of federal money devoted to clinical AIDS testing since the deadly disease was identified in 1981, federal health officials said, and could enroll as many as 1,000 patients within the next six months--enlarging by one-third the number of people with AIDS now participating in experimental programs.

“Everyone in the scientific research community who works in AIDS research shares the sense of urgency that is felt throughout the country, and now the world,” said Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is sponsoring the five-year study.

Five California Campuses

“We believe this new effort should greatly enhance our research capabilities and bring us closer to the answers we seek,” he said.

The program, which will be funded at $20 million during the first year, will test as many as six drugs in 14 institutions. They include five facilities in California and two in New York City, the regions with the largest concentrations of AIDS cases in the country. The California facilities are UCLA, USC, UC San Diego, UC San Francisco and Stanford University.

“There is no proven, effective treatment for AIDS at the present time, and the mortality rate may well approach 100% within five years of diagnosis,” Fauci said. “Well-designed, controlled clinical trials are critically important to our effort to defeat such a lethal opponent.”

AIDS destroys the body’s immune system, leaving it powerless against certain cancers, neurological disorders and otherwise rare infections.

Will Study Promising Drugs

The program will study drugs that “have shown promise in the laboratory or in preliminary clinical studies,” Fauci said. They include agents that act directly against HTLV-III, the virus that causes AIDS, as well as those that treat the opportunistic infections and cancers associated with the disease. The research will also examine agents known as “immunomodulators”--designed to restore or enhance the immune system--initially alone and later in combination with other drugs.

The drugs include azidothymidine, also known as AZT or Compound S; Foscarnet; HPA-23; ribavirin; interferon alpha, and possibly dideoxycytidine. With the exception of dideoxycytidine, which is still undergoing preclinical evaluation, all of these drugs have previously been studied in humans, but “we need further information about their action in different kinds of patients and against the various manifestations of illness,” Fauci said.

If any of the drugs proves especially promising, there is a “mechanism” for making it more widely available while it is still experimental, Fauci said.

Officials who will head the UCSD center said the unit will focus its research on therapies for the primary AIDS infection, while some of the 14 other national centers will key their research on the infections that usually accompany the deadly disease.

Virologists and associate professors of infectious diseases Stephen Spector and Douglas Richman will head the UCSD AIDS center. The center will be the second AIDS related program to be established at the university. Recently, the UCSD School of Medicine established a faculty chair for AIDS research with a $500,000 endowment from Florence Riford of La Jolla.

The UCSD School of Medicine will get $8.4 million over five years from the program announced Monday.

UCSD officials estimate that it will be six months before the treatment unit is operating. Eventually, up to 300 AIDS patients will be treated and their progress monitored at the center. According to the university officials, all of the San Diego area hospitals treating AIDS patients have agreed to refer them to the UCSD unit once it begins operation.

However, officials emphasized that the UCSD center is presently not ready to begin accepting AIDS patients.

Research at the UCSD center will be geared to developing a faster and more sensitive test for detecting the AIDS virus, officials said. Scientists will also study the psychological and neurological complications associated with AIDS, and researchers will attempt to detect changes in the brains of AIDS patients with the help of magnetic resonance imaging.

Other facilities in the program include Harvard University; Johns Hopkins University; Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center; New York University; University of Miami; University of Pittsburgh; University of Rochester; University of Texas, and the University of Washington.

As of Monday, there were 22,173 reported AIDS cases and 12,186 deaths.