NATION/WORLD
UN I V E R S I T Y D A I L Y K A N S A N
Friday, February 2, 1996
9A
New AIDS drugs prolong life
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — For the first time, researchers have compelling evidence that a powerful new class of AIDS drugs prolongs life and reduces complications for people at advanced stages of the disease.
These drugs, called protease inhibitors, attack the AIDS virus in a different way from the medicines that have been on the market for years.
Until now, scientists' enthusiasm for these medicines has been based on test tube signs that they work, such as a 100- to 1,000-fold reduction in levels of AIDS virus in patients' blood.
Finally, they have reason to think the drugs truly may accomplish what they are intended to do: Help AIDS patients live longer and better.
Encouraging evidence on two of these drugs — Abbott Laboratories' ritonavir and Merck & Co.'s indinavir — were released to researchers at this week's Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections.
The news produced a sense of optimism that is rare at AIDS gatherings, where the results of drug experiments so often are disappointing.
"Patients need to know this is promising," said William Paul, head of the federal Office of AIDS Research. "Scientifically, it is the best we have seen. It's an unfinished story but a very good beginning."
In a presentation yesterday, John Leonard of Abbott Laboratories showed that ritonavir cuts the death rate in half — at least temporarily — when given in late stages of AIDS.
Ritonavir or dummy pills were given randomly to
1,000 AIDS patients at 67 hospitals in the United States, Canada, Europe and Australia. All of the patients had ominously low levels of T-cells, a type of white blood cell and the main target of the AIDS virus in the bloodstream.
The patients continued to receive the AIDS drugs they already had been taking and were followed for seven months. By that time, 13 percent of the patients on ritonavir had died or had developed new AIDS-related illnesses, compared with 27 percent in the comparison group. The death rate was 4.8 percent in the ritonavir patients and 8.4 percent in the comparison group.
About 15 percent of patients on ritonavir dropped out of the study, and the most common side effect was vomiting and nausea. However, Leonard said some of the patients said they felt better, gained weight and even found that their AIDS-associated skin cancer had cleared up.
Abbott applied to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in December for permission to sell ritonavir, and the company hopes to have the medicine on the market in March.
with AZT, the first AIDS drug, suggested improved survival, but this was disputed by later research.
Earlier, researchers showed that both the Abbott and Merck drugs dramatically reduced levels of the virus in the blood when combined with other standard AIDS medicines, such as AZT and 3TC.
"This is a new milestone for determining progress in AIDS."
"There is no question this is an important step forward," said Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Showing that any AIDS medicine prolongs life has been extremely difficult. Studies a decade ago
Andre Pernet Research director
Merck's indinavir cut virus levels so low they could not be detected in 90 percent of patients using the most sensitive tests for viral genes. Abbott tried to grow viruses in cultures using blood taken from treated patients. They concluded the virus was gone in 25 percent of them.
"This is a new milestone for determining progress in AIDS," said Andre Pernet, Abbott's research director. "It's very important for the first time to be able to say patients are blood negative."
Some researchers believe it may make sense to start patients on a combination of protease inhibitors and other drugs as soon as they know they are infected.
"The dream is to start patients early when they have very low viral loads," said Pernet. "If you can suppress it without mutation long enough to let the infected cells be replaced by healthy cells, then you could cure it, although that has not been proved yet."
AIDS treatment really heats up
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON - AIDS researchers have received government permission to expand an unorthodox experiment: scalding patients' blood in an attempt to fight the deadly virus.
The Food and Drug Administration will let IDT Inc. add 60 AIDS patients to its trial, where the patient's blood is drained, heated to 114 degrees and steamed back in. Blood continues to circulate during the process.
IDT, which announced the expansion yesterday, said the new studies should give the company enough data on the therapy to ask the FDA to allow sales of the treatment.
The FDA's Susan Alpert said the trials merely showed that IDT could heat patients' blood without causing brain damage or other harm.
But the FDA cautioned that nobody has proved that this treatment helps AIDS patients.
some of the HIV roaming through patients' blood, temporarily clearing enough of the virus so that patients' exhausted immune systems have a chance to fight back.
The theory is that heat will kill
But many scientists doubt it. The first U.S. hypothermia attempt caused a scandal in 1990 when the government said the patient declared cured in fact never had HIV.
Still, IDT in 1994 convinced the FDA that it had devised a safer way to heat patients' blood — and to reliably measure the results — and won permission to test six deathly ill patients.
When all survived, the FDA last winter let IDT heat 20 people at a hospital in Lafayette, Ind., and compare them with 10 others treated conventionally. None of the patients whose temperatures reached 108 degrees have suffered any AIDS-related infections since, while two of the control group sickened, as did two whose temperatures didn't rise above 104 degrees.
Sub-zero temperatures continue to slow Great Plains states
The Associated Press
BISMARCK, N.D. — Your face freezes if you're outside more than a minute or so.
And your car, if it starts at all, turns over with a growl that asks: "Where do you think you're going with a wind chill near 90 below?"
Deadly arctic cold that settled in early this week continued to grip the Plains and the Midwest yesterday.
"Even zero looks good right now," said Steve Perkins, who was reading a newspaper and drinking coffee at a Bismarck cafe.
zero and had a wind chill of minus 86. Minot, N.D., Air Force base recorded a noon temperature of 33 below, with a wind chill of minus 93.
The cold has been blamed for several deaths. A 75-year-old woman in Craig, Mont., froze after she fell near her car and could not get up.
Record lows included 51 below zero in Ely, Minn.; 43 below at International Falls, Minn.; 36 below in Aberdeen, S.D.; 55 below in St. Cloud, Minn.; 33 below in Duluth, Minn.; and 25 below in Briggsdale, Colo.
In Nebraska, an 89-year-old man died in a house fire started by a space heater used to thaw frozen water lines.
"It takes your breath away," said Ron Dockter, a principal who called off classes for 440 students in Tioga, N.D. "It's brutal out there. We just didn't want to take any chances with buses and sending children out in this weather."
underwear, jeans, a T-shirt, two more shirts, an insulated flannel shirt, his service station uniform shirt and a winter coat.
Jay Krantz, who drives a tow truck for a Bismark service station, was busy with cars that wouldn't start. Under his coveralls, Krantz wore two pairs of long
By midmorning, Sidney, Mont., was 30 degrees below
"The wind blows right through everything," he said. In North Dakota and Montana, some people had to cope without power in addition to the cold for about nine hours.
About 200 households in Townsend, Mont., were without heat after a gas distribution system broke down. About 350 households in Minot, N.D., were without power when an underground cable broke.
were closed because the tubes through which checks and receipts are sent back and forth between customers and tellers were frozen.
In Burlington, Kan., workers succeeded in melting ice that had clogged the cooling system at the Wolf Creek nuclear plant since Tuesday. The plant remained shut down while workers tried to make sure the ice would not return.
With the temperature near zero in Indianapolis, Gene Mitchell's food cart did a brisk business in coffee. Mitchell, dressed in three winter coats with a hood pulled tightly around his head, said he sells more than 12 gallons a day when the weather is cold.
"Normally, crime does go down," said Stan Lyson, the sheriff in Williams County, N.D. "But we've been a deep freeze since Jan. 4, and we're starting to see the pinch of cabin fever — the number of domestic calls are starting to rise."
Mark Edinger of Fessenden, N.D., brought his two children to a shopping mall: "We're burning up a little energy, getting them out of the house."
In Chippewa Falls, Wis., a bank's drive-through lanes