Institutional Response to the HIV Blood Test Patent Dispute and Related Matters

INSTITUTIONAL RESPONSE TO...SPUTE AND RELATED MATTERS http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~ucg...StaRepFolder/StaRep5 htm
108). It is noteworthy that the PTO Examiner of the Gallo and Montagnier blood test patent
applications told Subcommittee staff she had ni i. " T: T. = - = p--
of LAV and IIIb were carried out as early as the Spring of 1984. The Examiner said this
information was clearly material to her examination of Gallo et al., and should have been
disclosed to PTO. Substantiating this assertion, when a paper by another group of scientists
y t -poring similar results, was published in August 1985, the examiner cited it in
suc-ort of her determinations that LAV and HTLV-III were the same virus and the work of
Montagnier et al. was prior art to Gallo et al.
The comparisons of the viral core proteins demonstrated the essential functional identity of the
z Yn i LTCB prototype viruses, while the results of the Western blot experiments indicated that
-P '-ists' failure to demonstrate the presence of the key envelope protein, gp41, was due
-t!hodological deficiencies, rather than any real difference in the IP and LTCB viruses.
Consequently, Dr. Gallo and his associates, around mid-June of 1984, made several
on-the-record statements to the effect that the IP and LTCB viruses were "closely related."
Thus:
"'There is data now that they could belong to the same virus group of the same virus
family,' said Gallo head of the team that made the American discovery" (June 14,
1984; Washington Post).
And in a paper whose senior author was Dr. Sarngadharan, the LTCB scientists used the results
of the proteins studies to induct the IP virus into the HTLV-III family:
Additional observations of a retrovirus likely belonging to theHTLV-Ill group were
"ndependently made by other investigators. A virus designated lymphadenopathy
associated virus (LAV) was first reported in cultured lymphocytes from a patient
with lymphadenopathy by Barre-Sinoin et - '
reported additional isolates called IDAV, from patients with AIDS (Vitmer et al.,
1984). Preliminary comparisons between these viruses and HTLV-III demonstrated
that they are closely related" (Sarngadharan et al., "Seroepidemiological Evidence
for HTLV-III Infection as the Primary Etiologic Factor for Acquired
Immunodeficieny Syndrome" (May 1984; Scientific Symposium of the American
Red Cross; Published in Dodd, R.Y. and Barker, L.F. (Eds.), Infection, Immunity,
and Blood Transfusion, Alan R. Liss, Inc., New York, 1985).
In June 1984, approximately one month after the Red Cross symposium, Dr. Sarngadharan was
quoted in a story inJAMA, the lead of which was this:
"... there is mounting belief that the retrovirus recently identified by National Cancer
Institute (NCI) investiEators (-e.....
reported last year by a group at the Institut Pasteur, Paris... are the same=
"... from the pattern of antibody reactions, I would be surprised if there is very much
- - T nigadharan, Ph.D.,... a member of the NCI group" (JAMA,
June 8, 1984, 251, No. 22; p. 2901).
The contents of the Chermann et al. paper, reporting the results of the immunological
comparisons of LAV and IIIb show how definitive were those results. This paper, which Gallo
and his associates coauthored, contained the following significant passage i 7 -n rodu

"Two human retroviruses have been recently implicated as th. 1.
Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). The first virus described was
-... ed Virus (LAV)... Another human virus,

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