Researchers Held to Prefer ‘Big Bucks’ : Academia Evading Fight on AIDS, FDA Chief Says

U.S. academic researchers have “markedly failed” in a time of a national health crisis because they refuse to get involved directly in government efforts to fight the AIDS epidemic, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Frank Young said Monday.

Scientists at colleges and universities are choosing to stay home and get “the big bucks” in research grants, Young said, instead of “getting into the fray” of evaluating the AIDS drugs that the FDA hopes to clear for clinical use.

“I believe the academic community has markedly failed in the AIDS problem,” Young told a conference of the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science. Academic researchers, he said, “are being irresponsible because they want to stand on the sidelines and grab the big bucks instead of taking the heat.”

Gave Up Laboratory

The 56-year-old commissioner said scientists from his generation believed it was an obligation to give some time to government service and that he, himself, gave up a laboratory with $2 million in research grants to take on his government job.

But most academic researchers now, he said, refuse to give any time to the government, even as the nation confronts what Young called “an extremely serious disease”--acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

Young said the FDA is attempting to speed the process of getting AIDS drugs onto the market but that there is a shortage of experts in evaluating drug-testing data.

He said that the only way to accelerate the process is to have more people available to evaluate the drugs as they are proposed to the FDA. Right now, he said, there are 162 drugs being evaluated, but the agency has only 127 people available to sift through applications, which can run to 100,000 pages.

Without the help of experts from academic laboratories, Young said, “the process will be slowed.”

The commissioner said he repeatedly has asked academic researchers to give two years of service to the government to help fight AIDS. Young said his agency is ready to pay such researchers the same salary they were receiving at their academic jobs.

“I see very few people willing to pay the price,” he said.

Young said that, of the 162 AIDS drugs now in some phase of evaluation and testing, three are vaccines. Tests of the vaccines, he said, are at least two years away and, when those tests do occur, “it’s going to be horrible.”

Can’t Use Animal Tests

The horror will come, he said, because there is no laboratory animal that can be used to test AIDS drugs and the vaccines will have to be tested on human patients. This means dangerous side effects usually detected in animal tests will be found, instead, among the human test subjects.

Also, Young said, only half of the AIDS patients being tested will receive the vaccine and the rest will receive a placebo. Since AIDS is thought to be 100% fatal, he said, those receiving the placebo probably will not survive.

Young said the vaccine testing probably will have to be conducted in African countries, where the rate of AIDS infection is far more serious than in the United States. French researchers, he said, probably will start testing a vaccine in Zaire sometime next year.