Autovaccination Report

An autovaccination treatment developed at the University of Dusseldorf in West Germany has shown impressive results in the 14 AIDS/ARC patients treated so far, according to a letter published last month in The Lancet. 42 additional patients have now entered the study.

The 14 patients started the treatment in 1985 and 1986. 12 have shown clear and often major clinical improvement-- including those who had had pneumocystis once or more before beginning. (Of the other two, one left the study in 1986 and died a year later; the second, an IV drug user who also has hepatitis B, is still alive although his condition has worsened since he started the trial in June of 1986.)

Comment

The treatment consists of a heat-treated, killed-virus vaccine prepared from each patient's own blood. This approach overcomes the usual vaccine problem of the great variation among different strains of HIV. A vaccine prepared for one strain usually will not work for others; but here the patient's own strain is used.

Autovaccination also eliminates the worry of reinfection with a different strain in case some of the virus should survive the heat treatment.

But how could it help to inoculate the patient with antigens which he or she already has? The answer may be that the AIDS virus subverts the process by which the body normally produces antibodies, causing it to produce more virus instead. But the killed virus cannot infect the T-helper cells, so it might allow the body's normal defenses to work, even when they could not work against the live virus.

For More Information

For more information about autovaccination as an AIDS/ARC treatment, see the letter by H. Bruster and others, The Lancet, June 4, 1988, pages 1284-1285. Most of the other information now available--referenced in that letter--has been published only in German.
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