U.S. and French Teams Claim New AIDS Discoveries

Two teams of U.S. and French scientists on Wednesday separately announced that each has found a virus in humans that appears to be related to the AIDS virus.

The meaning of the findings was not immediately clear. However, both groups suggested that further studies could lead to new insights into the deadly acquired immune deficiency syndrome, particularly in helping to develop a vaccine.

The U.S. researchers speculated that the virus they have identified may somehow protect people from contracting AIDS. However, the French said the virus they have just discovered appears to be associated with “certain rare cases of AIDS.”

It was not certain if the competing researchers were talking about the same agent or two different ones.

The seemingly contradictory findings deal with variations of a monkey virus associated with AIDS that has been isolated in humans living in West Africa.

In Boston, Dr. Phyllis Kanki, a Harvard University School of Public Health researcher, said a virus belonging to the same family as the virus that causes AIDS has been isolated from the blood of healthy people from the West African country of Senegal.

Blood Analyses

However, as early as November, her colleague, Dr. Myron Essex, had said at an AIDS conference in Brussels that such a virus existed, based on blood analyses from Senegalese. Because of its structural similarity to the AIDS virus, known as HTLV-III, Essex since has chosen to call his virus HTLV-IV.

Also on Wednesday, the Pasteur Institute in Paris announced that Dr. Luc Montagnier and a researcher from the University of Lisbon, Portugal, have discovered a virus in humans in Guinea-Bissau, also in West Africa.

The virus, like the one discovered by Essex, is also related to an African green monkey virus.

“It’s too hard to evaluate (Montagnier’s) data,” Kanki said in a telephone interview. “We know only what we have heard from rumors. We believe there is a variety of viruses in Africa and some are pathologic (disease-causing) and others are not.”

The Harvard study will be published next month in Science magazine and Essex is scheduled to hold a press conference today in Washington to announce the findings. Science also has Montagnier’s paper under review.

Montagnier is the discoverer of the LAV, or lymphotrophic-associated virus; like HTLV-III, which was discovered by Dr. Robert Gallo of the National Cancer Institute, it is accepted as the cause of AIDS. Although the viruses have different names, they are believed to be one and the same.

Essex believes that the AIDS virus and yet another virus that is found in healthy African green monkeys are members of the same family. In Brussels, he theorized that they were originally one virus that existed only in monkeys.

At some time in the past, however, Essex said, the virus came to infect humans, although not causing AIDS. Scientists who share this hypothesis speculate that more recently, the virus in humans mutated and became the lethal agent that causes AIDS. It then spread from Africa to the rest of the world.

Some Africans, however, may have retained the premutation version of the virus, which, because of its close relationship with the AIDS virus, stimulates the immune system to give some protection against AIDS by making antibodies against HTLV-III. It is these humans in Senegal from whom Essex and Kanki presumably have isolated HTLV-IV.

Outer Coating

Learning the structure of the outer coating of HTLV-IV may be useful in designing a vaccine that also would be protective.

A press release from the Pasteur Institute regarding Montagnier’s finding said blood studies done in Africa indicated that the French virus, LAV-II, is not widespread among Africans.

The press release noted that several research teams are studying a variety of viruses in Africa and that a comparison of them could lead to an understanding of the origin of AIDS and further preventive measures.

A news report in the French newspaper, Le Monde, said LAV-II was isolated from the blood of an AIDS patient from Guinea-Bissau, a former Portuguese colony in West Africa. A second isolation was made from a healthy patient from the same country. Reportedly they were the only two positives out of a group of 2,000 people tested for the presence of the virus.