S.D. Well Represented at Annual AIDS Conference : Health: Several dozen researchers will present their findings in San Francisco, reflecting the more than $40 million committed to projects here in the past few years.

The 15,000 people descending on San Francisco this week for the sixth International Conference on AIDS will include a few dozen from the wide variety of research programs centered in San Diego.

The local contingent will present research results on everything from how best to treat AIDS-related infections to whether patient advisory boards are useful at AIDS clinics.

As the variety of presentations indicates, if San Diego has been an afterthought in national AIDS treatment funding, it has not been so in research. More than $40 million has been committed to federally funded AIDS research in San Diego County over the past several years.

The money has set up an AIDS research infrastructure, including the following programs at UC San Diego:

* A clinical trials unit for evaluating new AIDS treatments, one of 32 such centers set up by the National Institutes of Health. It has a five-year grant for $8.7 million.

A co-director of the unit, Dr. Douglas Richman, was singled out by AIDS activists in San Francisco on Tuesday as one of five key researchers in the United States responsible for too much money being spent on tests of a single anti-AIDS drug, AZT.

* A pediatric AIDS clinical trials unit, one of 15 set up by the federal government to study the special treatment needs of children infected with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which causes AIDS. The unit is receiving $2.5 million over five years.

* The California Collaborative Treatment Group, a state-funded consortium of four California universities at which AIDS therapies are evaluated. UCSD receives about $350,000 a year; other schools in the program are USC, Stanford University and University of California, Irvine.

* The HIV Neurobehavioral Research Center, funded by the federal government for $19.5 million over five years. Its latest research has found evidence of brain dysfunction in some people infected with HIV even before they show any other AIDS symptoms.

* A vaccine development group, a $7.5-million effort announced last week and headed by Flossie Wong-Staal, a leading AIDS researcher who took an endowed professorship at UCSD in January.

In addition, the Owen Clinic at UCSD has more than 650 AIDS patients. With $1.6 million in demonstration project funding, county health officials have worked with the clinic and others to develop a community model for setting up treatment of people infected with the AIDS virus.

This community model will be extended and expanded if the county receives an expected $8 million in federal funds for AIDS treatment.

The money is part of an AIDS “disaster relief” package for cities hit hardest by AIDS that is pending in Congress. San Diego was included in the measure only after special pleas by officials here. Since 1981, the county has recorded 2,048 AIDS cases, 1,222 which have already been fatal.

If that money arrives, it will augment a treatment system that now depends heavily on research efforts to keep it going, doctors say.

“All those researchers who are physicians . . . actually help care for patients in various settings,” said Dr. J. Allen McCutchan, director of the California Collaborative Treatment Group at UCSD. “So it creates a much broader group of physicians than would be here if we didn’t have the research going on.”

The close collaboration between researchers and clinicians also has meant the quick transfer of new findings into treatment for San Diego patients. For instance, UCSD physicians will present results Saturday in San Francisco on a more effective drug treatment regime for AIDS patients who have pneumonia. The results over the past year have been so dramatic, said UCSD researcher Dr. Samuel A. Bozzette, that he expects the study to change the accepted protocol for treating this pneumonia among thousands of patients nationwide.

Such research results also filter quickly into training programs for doctors who treat AIDS patients in the wider community. These include mini-residencies offered by the Owen Clinic.

Although San Diego research groups all are sending representatives to the San Francisco meeting, the expectations of protests and confrontation was dulling their enthusiasm, scientists indicated last week.

“I hope it doesn’t get to be a physically intimidating situation,” McCutchan said. “About half the people I talk to are significantly worried so that they wish they weren’t going.”

McCutchan noted that the conference has gotten so huge--with 600 oral presentations over four days, as well as 2,700 poster presentations--that he has arranged with a group of AIDS researchers to divide up conference sessions and meet later to report to each other.

Other UCSD research being presented at the San Francisco meeting, or at other AIDS meetings coordinated with it this week, includes:

* A study by scientists at the HIV Neurobehavioral Research Center indicating that losses in neurologic functioning--such as inability to concentrate and remember--can be seen very early in about a quarter of the people who are infected with HIV but have no symptoms.

That result contradicts an earlier study done elsewhere that had found no problems, said Dr. Igor Grant, director of the center.

“It’s smaller than we thought, but it’s bigger than they think,” Grant said.

* A study led by Terri Jernigan, also at the neurobehavioral center, indicating shrinkage of an area deep within the brain, the diencephalon, as HIV infection progresses. The diencephalon is involved in many brain functions, particularly memory and emotion.

Jernigan found the shrinkage by doing magnetic resonance imaging of the brains of people in varying stages of AIDS.

* Gene-based testing of how soon after infection HIV appears in the cerebrospinal fluid.

* Results of experiments on how best to treat cytomegalovirus infections of the retina, a complication of AIDS.

* Data on alternating use of two different antiviral drugs, AZT and ddC, to see whether weekly or monthly alternation is better at minimizing the negative side effects of the drugs.