GALLO, MONTAGNIER HOPE TO SPEED AIDS ANSWERS TOGETHER

BALTIMORE, MD - Two of the world's leading AIDS researchers, Robert Gallo of the University of MarylandBiotechnology Institute (UMBI) and Luc Montagnier, president, World Foundation for AIDS Research and Prevention, have agreed to pool their research efforts to help speed critical discoveries and vaccine trials.

Gallo and Montagnier, in the 1980's the co-discoverers of the virus that causes AIDS, will co-direct the new Program for International Viral Collaboration, associated with the foundation, and under the auspices of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

For more than two decades, the two AIDS scientific colleagues have each established a network of research laboratories and partnerships around the world.

Under a collaborative agreement, their new program will provide enhanced opportunities for the foundation to lead in developing resources for sponsoring and funding a wide network involving research laboratories in Baltimore, Rome, Montreal, Nigeria, Cameroon, the Ivory Coast and other sites in Africa, Central America and Asia - all sites of high HIV prevalence where Gallo and Montagnier have research relations.

"Bringing the two scientists together to work together on AIDS is a giant step forward in this decade towards improvement of the treatments and finding a cure for these devastating disease," comments UMBI President Jennie Hunter-Cevera.

"We are friends and collaborators and look forward to this new chapter in which we both strive for new solutions-which the whole world awaits-in halting the destructive path of HIV/AIDS," says Gallo, the director of UMBI's Institute of Human Virology (IHV).

Montagnier adds, "HIV is an almost impossible virus to mastermind and it may not be possible until we come together, sharing our insights and moving forward together to advance this goal. Now, we can more quickly move these concepts forward at a level that will have a more immediate global impact."

By targeting sites in Africa other continents, the new program will provide an "optimal platform" for a balanced international partnership and a comprehensive effort to translate scientific concepts into practical and effective vaccines, say the researchers.

Existing resources available to the new program include:

• The IHV vaccine unit has pioneered a novel oral vaccine delivery system utilizing a disarmed Salmonella bacterium to deliver a great number of viral genes to the body in order to stimulate an immune response. The Salmonella delivery system is effective at enabling an immune response against sexual exposure to HIV.
• The second IHV vaccine targets a molecule of the HIV virus called tat that paralyzes the immune response. The vaccine is based on research concepts developed by Daniel Zagury in Paris in collaboration with Gallo and developed by Aventis Pasteur, a European vaccine company and component of Aventis.
  
• In still another approach, IHV scientists have developed a novel vaccine that generates the broadest HIV immune response seen to date, blocking infection by diverse strains of HIV in laboratory experiments. The vaccine is expected to go into clinical trials in about two years.
  
• Montagnier and Collaborators in Italy and Ivory Coast are selecting HIV peptides from the tat, gag, and nef, that are specific African AIDS patients. The research concept for a combined post-exposure vaccine based on synthetic HIV peptides has been developed by Vittorio Colizzi and collaborators at the University of Rome "Tor Vergata" and at the UNESCO Laboratory established in 1998 by Montagnier at the Italian Institute for Infectious Diseases "L. Spallanzani," in cooperation with the Italian National Research Council (CNR) and the UNESCO Regional Office for Science and Technology in Europe. The practical aspect of the approach is that HIV peptides will be incorporated and associated to a vaccine used in newborns to induce protection against tuberculosis. This vaccine may be particularly helpful in the prevention of HIV vertical mother-to-child transmission in Africa. (Both tat and nef proteins are critical regulators of HIV infection. Scientists believe they are also released by infected cells and contribute to impairment of an immune response against HIV.)
  
• Montagnier, Thibodeau and colleagues in Montreal are also developing a vaccine generating in animal models broadly neutralizing antibodies based on a genetically modified HIV envelope protein.
  
• Research in the program will be augmented by cohort studies and clinical trials.
  
• And research efforts will be accompanied by activities concerning preventive education and training for transfer of scientific knowledge to make researchers in the developing countries players on the stage of stopping HIV/AIDS through cooperation with UNESCO.

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Contact: Gwen Newman, IHV 410.706.4616