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| health > AIDS > story page |         |
Internet project may help AIDS patients find better treatments fasterJuly 12, 1999
By Laura Lane (WebMD) -- Imagine that you're infected with a deadly virus that eventually will kill you. Medical scientists have been unable to find a cure for your infection. And while those scientists scramble to study new drugs and therapies for your infection, you're left waiting, the clock ticking -- until a cure is found or you die. Whichever comes first. The virus is HIV and the disease is AIDS That scenario may soon change as the American Association of Health Plans and several AIDS activist groups and health institutions prepare to launch the HIV: Treatment Data Project, which will help medical scientists and persons with AIDS find better treatments by using the Internet. The disease came into the limelight in the late 1980s and quickly began to spring up in countries all over the world. Since then, researchers have come up with a number of drugs and therapies that have saved many lives. But eradicating such an evasive virus hasn't been easy, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The much-hailed protease-inhibitor combination therapy has yielded many resistant viruses. The therapy has never worked for some patients. Improving lives, hastening research With the new project, persons with AIDS will be able to tell about their experience with a drug treatment -- the effectiveness and side effects. Others could learn from the information, said project director Rodger McFarlane, who has been at the forefront of AIDS activism. Scientists could then pool all the data to draw conclusions about drugs and come up with the most effective combinations. "This is the dawn of Web science," McFarlane said. "We're actually doing research of scientific rigor over the Internet." McFarlane emphasized that the project is not a replacement for controlled clinical trials. The project simply attempts to speed the process of clinical research, which typically takes years to examine the effectiveness of one drug combination. The project also will examine how all types of people react to drug therapies,which clinical trials haven't been able to do, said Sherrie Kaplan, associate professor of medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine and scientific director for the project. Physicians, too, may be able to access the Web site to find out how a specific type of patient might react to a certain drug combination, Kaplan said. The project is the brainchild of Larry Kramer, founder of the Gay Men's Health Crisis, the largest AIDS organization in the country. Kramer, who's HIV-positive, first came up with the idea two years ago. He said that he is excited to see the project come to fruition that will empower persons with AIDS and help them to learn more about the barrage of treatments currently available. "At the very least we will be able to pick up very quickly what the side effects are," Kramer said of the drug treatments, which are sometimes toxic. "And this is something that standard clinical testing doesn't (offer) for several years." The project will begin at three test sites that will let organizers see how the program works and if confidentiality can be maintained. Safeguards have been programmed into the system to preserve confidentiality, as well as to prevent people from entering false information, said Karen Ignani, president of The American Association of Health Plans, which contributed $1.5 million to the project. IBM's Lotus Development also supported the project, providing its technical expertise. Health and health-care information provider WebMD will host the site. The Atlanta-based company has not yet set an exact date to launch the data project. Organizers said that they hope to form similar projects for diabetes, hepatitis, breast cancer and asthma. These diseases, like AIDS, are treated with multiple approaches. As Kaplan explained, "One size doesn't fit all -- that's kind of the point" for the treatment data project.
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