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Britain’s AIDS research is to lose its right to a guaranteed level of
funding from the Medical Research Council. From this autumn, the council’s
ring-fenced budget for work on HIV will disappear, and AIDS researchers
will have to compete for money with those in other fields.

The decision, which was due to be explained to senior researchers this
week, follows a year-long review of the MRC’s £16 million AIDS programme
by an international panel of scientists. Last week, the council accepted
the panel’s recommendations for an overhaul of the entire programme.

The move comes as many Western governments are reining in their spending
on AIDS. The explosive epidemics predicted in the mid-1980s have not materialised
in industrialised countries, in contrast to what has happened in the developing
world. At the same time, some biomedical researchers have criticised the
‘gravy train’ of AIDS research.

The MRC denies any link between these factors and the changes to its
programme. Alan Stone, head of the AIDS secretariat at the MRC, says the
overhaul will not necessarily mean less money. ‘AIDS research is still regarded
by the council as a high priority,’ he says. ‘But it must be dealt with
in a competitive way to be fair.’

The MRC set up its AIDS programme in 1987. Its purpose, says Stone,
was to get work on AIDS moving quickly, and that has been done. At present
the MRC’s AIDS research is divided into two arms: the strategic programme,
which covers work on the nature of AIDS and its treatment, and monitors
the spread of HIV; and the directed programme, which is targeted specifically
at developing drugs and vaccines.

This divided structure will be replaced by a single AIDS research coordinating
committee, which will oversee the MRC’s strategy and avoid duplication.
The committee will not allot funds, as the AIDS programme’s committees have
until now. Instead, proposals for grants will go through the same machinery
as all others involving infectious diseases.

Robin Weiss, a virologist and an out-spoken critic of the council in
the past, said that he was not worried by the news, although he stressed
that he had yet to hear it officially. ‘I don’t see why AIDS should not
defend its quality on the same level playing field as other aspects of the
MRC’s portfolio,’ he said. ‘If we are not putting up original ideas and
good science we don’t deserve to be funded.’

The AIDS programme’s successes include the Concorde trial, which showed
that the drug zidovudine (AZT) cannot delay the onset of AIDS in HIV-positive
people without symptoms, or increase their life expectancy. But the MRC
was also criticised for spending millions of pounds repeating vaccine experiments
in monkeys that had already been done in the US.