AIDS-Like Cases Called No Cause for Alarm : Researcher: The Irvine doctor whose report set off controversy patiently accommodates the media but he does not seem to relish the international attention.
Amid the clutter of his UC Irvine immunology lab Thursday, Dr. Sudhir Gupta posed this way and that for one television news crew after another. Gupta holding a tray of vials; Gupta standing next to a sample cabinet.
Dan Rather’s “CBS Evening News” crew rolled in next, moving the nattily dressed immunologist to the next room, where he sat before a refrigerator to explain for the umpteenth time: No, he had not discovered a new AIDS virus.
With just the barest hint of impatience, Gupta said he and his colleagues have found a previously unrecognized virus in a woman with AIDS-like symptoms. The woman has tested negative for the two human immunodeficiency viruses known to cause AIDS. But Gupta reiterated that it is too soon to tell whether this virus is the cause of illness in her or more than two dozen other baffling cases of the AIDS-like disease seen by researchers around the world.
“It’s frustrating, yes,” the 48-year-old chief of immunology at the UC Irvine College of Medicine told The Times. “You want to get a tape recorder and just play it for everybody instead of repeating the same thing over and over.”
Gupta, who is described by colleagues as a hard-driven, ambitious researcher, seems not to have relished the international attention generated by the release of his results Wednesday, several weeks before they will be be published in a scientific journal. Yet he smiled calmly when asked how he felt about colleagues at the eighth International AIDS Conference in Amsterdam who expressed reservations about his findings.
“The first time there is always skepticism. . . . That is not uncommon and it is not directed at me,” Gupta said. “. . . I have said over and over that what we have seen is an association and that it is not necessarily the cause of those cases.”
He said he would have been at the Amsterdam gathering if he had not had a commitment to organize and host a medical college reunion this week in Newport Beach.
Gupta’s virus is known as human intracisternal retrovirus because it is found in small cavities within infected cells. In contrast, the human immunodeficiency viruses, which are known as HIV-1 and HIV-2, are usually seen in the electron microscope as small buds that form on the outer rim of cells.
Gupta’s search for the virus began two years ago when a 66-year-old woman was referred to him suffering from AIDS-related pneumonia but no evidence of the AIDS virus. The woman’s immune defects, however, were a “ditto copy of AIDS.” Gupta said he became “pretty convinced that there had to be a cause,” such as another virus.
Gupta and four collaborators used viral and immunological techniques that had been used in the discovery of the AIDS virus to search for a new virus. Late last year, they detected the first signs that such a virus might be present, not only in the patient but also in her adult daughter, who is not ill.
It was not until this June that they felt confident enough of their findings to submit a paper to a scientific journal.
In addition to trying to find the virus in other patients, Gupta said, the next steps were for researchers to try to purify the virus, grow it in large quantities in the laboratory, and to determine its molecular structure.
Eventually, researchers would also want to try to infect animals with the virus to see if they become ill with an AIDS-like illness. Such an experiment would be crucial in determining whether the virus is simply present in patients, or if it causes disease.
Gupta comes from a well-to-do family in the city of Bijnor in northern India. Rather than take over his father’s 400-acre farm, he said, he decided at age 11 to follow the path of his grandfather, great-grandfather and uncles into medical college.
Gupta was one of the top six graduates in his class at India’s King George’s Medical College. At first he planned to be a cardiologist. But in 1975 he felt there were too many heart doctors in his own country and in the West, so he decided on the emerging field of immunology.
At Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research in New York, where he has also worked, colleagues remember him as a workaholic known for his determination to excel.
“He was one of those few faculty who practically lived their life in the labs,” said Dr. Neena Kapoor, a former colleague at Sloan-Kettering who is director of Ohio State University’s pediatric bone marrow transplant program in Columbus.
“He is somebody who constantly had this drive to discover something new, to make some new contribution to the field of immunology.
Gupta has worked at UC Irvine since 1982. In addition to administrative duties, he is the editor in chief of the Journal of Clinical Immunology, an adviser to Orange County’s AIDS Task Force and the adviser to a university HIV awareness group.
“I think he’s a real hero,” said Robert F. Gentry, a gay who is UCI’s dean of student support services and mayor of Laguna Beach. “He has come into this AIDS fight wholeheartedly. . . . He’s always been involved, supportive and giving of information to the community about the latest research on AIDS.
“It’s people like him who are going to make the difference and save lives.”
HIV INFECTION RATE: A report of a rise in the rate of HIV infection was disputed by county health officials. B3
