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                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, February 18, 1993                   TAG: 9302180031
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A8   EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE: NEW YORK                                LENGTH: Short

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DRUG MIX STOPS AIDS SPREAD IN TEST TUBE

A combination of three drugs has stopped the AIDS virus from reproducing in the test tube, researchers report, raising hopes of someday keeping AIDS infections at bay in people.

"We can prevent infection of new cells by this technique better than we have been able to do with any other strategy we've studied over the past six or seven years," said Dr. Martin Hirsch.

If the technique also blocks the spread of the virus within people, a patient's immune system might be able to "at least keep the virus in control for long periods of time, and perhaps forever," he said in a telephone interview. He compared that prospect to treatment of diabetes.

But he and other scientists cautioned that it will take experiments in humans to see if the technique really works.

The test tube work is presented in today's issue of the journal Nature by Hirsch, Yung-Kang Chow and others at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston.

They used the standard drugs AZT and dideoxyinosine, also called ddI, and a third compound called pyridinone.

The three drugs were chosen to overcome the fact that the AIDS virus can evolve to become resistant to individual drugs. - Associated Press

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Memo: shorter version ran in the Metro edition.

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