Once were rivals: The co-discoverers of the AIDS virus, Robert Gallo (R) and Luc Montagnier (L) address journalists during an international symposium to mark the 25th anniversary of the discovery of the virus.

Credit: AFP

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PARIS: New ideas, young talent and injections of money are needed to invigorate the war against AIDS, said top experts at a meeting to review progress since HIV was discovered 25 years ago.

At the conference – held in Paris, France – men and women in the front line of the combat said there had been some remarkable successes in fighting AIDS.

They hailed the swift identification of the pathogen that causes acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) and the advent of the "triple cocktail" of drugs in the mid-1990s that transformed a death sentence into a manageable, long-term disease.

Cruel setbacks

But they also spoke of cruel setbacks. These include the slow search for both a vaccine – the only way of stopping the global pandemic – and an effective HIV-blocking vaginal gel to shield women.

Such failures show basic questions remain to be answered about HIV's shape-shifting properties and its stealthy invasion of immune cells, they said (see, From 'gay plague' to global tragedy, Cosmos Online).

"We still don't completely understand the various forms of the virus. It's more complicated for us than we thought," said France's Luc Montagnier, who with Robert Gallo of the United States first identified HIV (the human immunodeficiency virus) as the cause of AIDS.

"We need to go back to the question of basic research, to have new ideas, new teams, to take a new look at cellular biology," said Jean-Francois Delfraissy, director of French National Agency for AIDS Research (ANRS) in Paris

Alice Dautry, head of the Pasteur Institute, said the next phase of AIDS research called for "a multidisciplinary approach, for looking at the problem through different eyes. When there is a problem, it has to be attacked from every direction."

25 years and 25 million dead

Gallo, who heads up the University of Maryland's Institute of Virology in Baltimore, called for a rethink of vaccine strategy in the light of two bad flops in this field. Of the prototype vaccines that are in the pipeline, some would be a waste of money and precious resources and could discourage volunteers from taking part, if they were put into costly, large-scale trials, he said.

"Fundamental biological questions [need to be addressed] before some vaccines go forward, or we tend to waste money, produce a depressing atmosphere in the field and take money away from the basic science that is needed right now," he said.

AIDS emerged as a new disease in 1981, initially attracting the attention of the medical community when it spread rapidly among young and otherwise healthy gay men in the USA. Today, the disease has claimed around 25 million lives and another 33 million are infected (see, HIV/AIDS: a timeline, Cosmos Online).

Gallo also attacked what he called a worrying tendency to sideline AIDS as a manageable disease in the age of antiretroviral drugs.

Only a fraction of people living in Africa who need the lifeline therapy actually receive it, he said.

"The [2004 Indian Ocean] tsunami made great headlines, as it should have – 200,000 people died in one month," he told a press conference on Monday as the three-day academic meeting got underway. "But every month, there's an AIDS tsunami – 200,000 people die of AIDS. Do you think it gets the attention it deserves?"

Bitter dispute

On May 20 1983, Montagnier's team at the Pasteur Institute published a paper in the U.S. journal Science, describing a virus found in a patient who died of AIDS. Gallo later demonstrated that a virus, found to be the same one isolated by Montagnier, caused the disease(see, The hunt for HIV, Cosmos Online).

For several years, an often-bitter dispute unfolded as to who was the first to discover the virus, culminating in a 1987 settlement at top political level under which the duo shared the credit.

"As far as I'm concerned, [the row] was settled over 20 years ago, completely, in every respect," said Gallo, pointing out that he and Montagnier co-author research papers these days.

Montagnier, now chairman of the UNESCO World Foundation for AIDS Research and Prevention, based in Paris, said he was "completely in agreement ... there were legal problems, problems about intellectual property that were resolved above our heads."