AIDS PANEL CALLS FOR OVERHAUL OF FEDERAL RESEARCH.

Byline: Lawrence K. Altman The New York Times

The government's $1.4 billion AIDS research program lacks focus, is uncoordinated and needs a major overhaul to attract new scientific talent and spur novel and imaginative ideas, a government-appointed panel said in a report issued Wednesday.

But the panel of 114 leading scientists and representatives of academia, drug companies, community organizations and AIDS advocates rejected the idea of an institute devoted specifically to AIDS.

Although 15 years of AIDS research has brought impressive gains, the program needs more ongoing scientific oversight and review by nongovernment scientists, the panel said.

It also said there were too many delays in the process that awards grants to scientists in the government and at hundreds of research centers across the country, thus inevitably slowing the progress that can be made against AIDS.

In "numerous instances" the government's process "unfortunately appears to have failed in the identification of the most promising research projects," said the panel, which was headed by Dr. Arnold J. Levine of Princeton University.

The panel urged development of a better information system to track the entire portfolio of money that the National Institutes of Health, the government's chief research center, spends on AIDS research at its headquarters in Bethesda, Md., and elsewhere. The United States pays for 85 percent of all public sector AIDS research in the world, and the driving force is the NIH.

The panel called for focusing efforts in five major areas: drug development, vaccine development, clinical trials, immunology and basic research. the report also urged the strengthening the agency's Office of AIDS Research, which commissioned the study. The report had been scheduled to be released at a news conference in Washington today, but the Associated Press reported on the findings Wednesday.

Dr. William Paul, the director of the federal Office of AIDS Research, said that he was pleased with the report and that an advisory council had approved it.

"The report has the potential, if implemented appropriately, to make a real difference in AIDS research," Paul said in an interview. He said he would work with the 24 directors of the institutes that make up the NIH to put the thrust of the panel's recommendations into place as quickly as possible because "we're facing a medical emergency" in AIDS.

"Maybe people had a bad feeling about the way AIDS research was developing at the NIH," said Derek Link, the assistant director of Gay Men's Health Crisis, "but no one knew where the money went and what needed to be moved where to have better programs based on science. That's what we have now: an agenda for the next 10 years."

Patricia S. Fleming, the director of the Office of National AIDS Policy in the White House, said through a spokesman that "it was a courageous act" by the leaders of the NIH to open up the AIDS research program to outside scrutiny. "I have full confidence in the leadership of the NIH," Fleming said, "that they will take this blueprint and move us aggressively into the future."

But Larry Kramer, a founder of Gay Men's Health Crisis and ACTUP, who has long been an outspoken critic of the government's AIDS research program, said the panel's report added little new. "We've lost another year and a half for another bunch of people to tell us what we already know and what anybody with half a brain has known since 1981," he said.

The panel has worked with the support of Paul. "I credit Bill Paul tremendously for having sponsored this study and having opened up the whole program to a careful look," said Dr. David Baltimore of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was a member of the panel. Baltimore characterized the report as "a mid-course correction" of the kind required in "any program that has ramped up rapidly."