Duke, UNC share AIDS grant

The Chronicle DURHAM, N.C. -- (U-WIRE) AIDS researchers at the Duke University Medical Center and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as well as North Carolina's thousands of AIDS and HIV patients, will benefit from a $21 million five-year grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to fund ongoing and new studies. Although Duke and UNC-CH applied separately for the grant, both were awarded money -- $8.5 million to Duke and $12.5 million to UNC. The grants were awarded based on the number of AIDS and HIV patients an institution treats and studies, the original ideas it has generated and the quality of data and scientific papers it produces. "Over the years, both the Duke unit and the North Carolina unit have been very effective at reaching the effective population in the state," said Frederick Batzold, a spokesman for the National Institutes of Health, the NIAID's parent organization. Nearly every AIDS patient in the state is treated by one of the two health system giants -- each treats about 1,200 patients. The money will be used to help relieve the burden of medical and lab costs as well as transportation fees from patients and the state programs that support them. It will save the state $3 million annually. Over the next several months and years, researchers at both schools will enroll 1,000 patients in a series of studies designed to test new and existing AIDS drugs and their effects on different types of patients in various stages of the disease. The funds will be used to pay for the subjects' transportation to and from clinics, medication, lab costs and the increased frequency of doctor visits. "There are a lot of drugs already FDA approved that are very costly," said UNC's lead researcher Charles van der Horst, Trinity '74. "The combo therapy we use now -- three or four drugs active against HIV -- can cost $10,000 to $15,000 each year. Many of these patients are indigent. Medicaid pays for medication, but Medicare does not pay for it? so the working poor are out of luck." North Carolina doctors face unique challenges in treating the disease because the population is rural and many residents suffer from severe poverty. Doctors also say many high-risk residents are not being tested frequently enough. "It is a rural state and HIV is in every little nook and cranny," van der Horst said. "If we were in Manhattan, patients could hop on the subway for $1.50, but you can't do that here. You may have to drive for three hours to get treatment.? The poverty in this state boggles the mind." He noted that there are 20 counties in eastern North Carolina where more than 25 percent of residents live below the poverty line. In 1998, 8,769 North Carolinians had been diagnosed with AIDS and another 8,479 adults and adolescents had tested positive for HIV but had not yet developed full-blown AIDS. Large numbers of the state's young people are contracting the disease in their teenage years. In 1998, 119 residents diagnosed with AIDS were between 13 and 29 years old, and 333 of the males diagnosed with HIV were within this age group. "The fact that two of the 32 [research institutes to get such grants] are in North Carolina calls attention to the ongoing HIV epidemic in the southeast," Duke's lead researcher John Bartlett said in a statement. "The southeast reports more new cases of HIV infection than any other region in the country, a fact that has escaped the attention of many people in the region and nationally," he explained. Bartlett, an associate professor in the Medical Center's department of infectious diseases, was out of town Thursday.