UCI Researcher Suddenly Under the Microscope
Amid the clutter of his UC Irvine immunology lab Thursday, one television crew after another posed Dr. Sudhir Gupta this way and that. 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 that, 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 native of India, who is chief of immunology at UCI’s College of Medicine told a visitor. “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 spotlight generated by the release of his results Wednesday, several weeks before they will 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, some even suggesting he had released them prematurely.
It was the National Academy of Sciences, Gupta pointed out, that decided he should discuss his research paper before its scheduled Aug. 15 publication data in the biweekly Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And that was in response to a request by Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of AIDS research for the National Institutes of Health, for clinicians around the world to release their information on cases of AIDS-like disease in people who test negative for the AIDS viruses.
As for questions about the research itself, he shrugged.
“The first time there is always skepticism. . . . That is not uncommon, and it is not directed at me,” said Gupta, who would have been at the Amsterdam gathering were he not hosting his medical college’s class reunion this week in Newport Beach.
Besides, he added, “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.”
This week’s publicity is not the first time that reported discoveries of new viruses in patients with AIDS-like illnesses have been touted. In 1986, Shyh-Ching Lo, a virologist at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, claimed to have isolated a new virus from AIDS patients with Kaposi’s sarcoma, an AIDS-related tumor affecting the skin and other organs.
It turned out that Lo had not discovered a virus. Instead, he appears to have found evidence of another type of microorganism, known as a mycoplasma. Some scientists, believe that mycoplasma infections sometimes contribute to the development of AIDS. Other researchers, however, doubt these infections are significant.
Gupta’s virus is known as an “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 patient came to him with an 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 subsequently 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 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.
One of the top six graduates in his 1970 class at India’s King George’s Medical College, Gupta initially planned to be a cardiologist. But by then, there already were too many heart doctors in his own country and in the West. He chose medical research because, as he put it: “If you are a good practicing doctor, the community knows you. If you are a good scientist, the world knows you.”
At Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research in New York, where he worked in the late 1970s and early 1980s, colleagues remember him as a workaholic with a determination to excel.
“He was one of those few faculty who practically lived their life in the labs,” recalled Dr. Neena Kapoor, a former colleague at Sloan-Kettering who is now 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,” Kapoor said. “I am very excited about this new information and I’m very thrilled for him.”
Gupta came to UCI in 1982 as a professor of medicine and chief of immunology. These days, he has two assistant professors and a host of lab assistants working under him. He figures he works about 18 hours a day but regrets that much of that time is taken up with administrative duties.
He tries to set aside two hours each day for his 10-year-old daughter, Anki, and 6-year-old son, Saurabh.
“My daughter knows more about AIDS than some physicians,” Gupta said proudly. “She wants to be a researcher like her father. My boy wants to be an obstetrician like his mother.”
His children have been delighted to see their father on virtually every TV news program the last two days. But to Gupta, the recognition that counts he already has from colleagues in the international community of immunologists.
When the spotlight fades--soon, Gupta hopes--he plans to return to his normal routine, which includes serving as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Clinical Immunology. In his spare time, he also is an adviser to Orange County’s AIDS Task Force and to a UCI AIDS awareness group.
It is Gupta’s tireless effort from the very beginning stages of AIDS research that most endears him to Robert F. Gentry, UCI’s dean of student support services and the mayor of Laguna Beach who is gay.
“I think he’s a real hero,” said Gentry. “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.”
ON THE CASE: Experts call new AIDS-like virus no cause for alarm. A16
