Cameroon: Aids vaccine: doctor cries foul.

When Professor Victor Anomah Ngu (above) announced in Yaounde in 2001 that he had developed an auto-vaccine therapy against HIV/Aids, his colleagues at home rubbished his claims. Now, he says an American company has taken his discovery. Tansa Musa reports.

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Three years after he had been laughed at by his colleagues at home, Prof Victor Ngu was comforted when the Emory University School of Medicine in the USA, showed interest last year in his work. The two went on to sign a confidentiality and collaboration agreement to pursue the research.

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But on 16 December 2003, Prof Ngu (a 1972 Albert Lasker Award winner in cancer research), alleged that the American company, Lipid Sciences Inc, borrowed his work and claimed it for itself. Ngu made the allegations in Yaounde 13 days after Lipid Sciences announced in Pleasanton, California, that it had completed successful studies in a mouse animal model.

The company described the studies as an important development milestone. It further said it was now initiating a series of non-human primate studies to further validate its "unique delipidation technology" with the ultimate goal of developing a therapeutic vaccine for use against HIV.

"Based on the excellent results we have seen in animal studies with mice, we have now moved our developmental programme forward to nonhuman primates. This step is consistent with our strategic plan and is the next step in the validation of our viral immunotherapy platform," noted Dr. S. Lewis Meyer, president and CEO of Lipid Sciences.

"The final results of these non-human primate studies will enable the company to present data to the FDA [Food and Drug Administration] and discuss what additional pre-clinical testing, if any, might need to be completed before we move into a human clinical trial," Meyer added.

Lipid Sciences is a development-stage company engaged in the research and development of products and processes to treat major medical conditions. The company's viral immunotherapy platform is focused on the removal of lipid coatings from viruses and other infectious agents by applications of its delipidation technology.

According to the company, removing the protective lipid coating of viruses exposes otherwise hidden proteins to stimulate the body's immune system and elicit an enhanced therapeutic response.

But the process shows striking similarity to Prof Ngu's discovery, presented to the public in Yaounde (Cameroon's capital) in 2001. Ngu's "Vanhivax" is prepared from the HIV present in his patients and administered to them as a vaccine. From trials, it has shown to cause a drop in the viral loads of patients and an increase in body weight and CD4 count.

Incidentally, Lipid Sciences' mouse studies were conducted under the direction of Dr Aftab Ansari, professor at the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the Emory University's School of Medicine.

He is a member of the Lipid Sciences' viral advisory board. He was in Yaounde at the time Prof Ngu announced his ground-breaking discovery and negotiated the confidentiality and collaborative agreement between his institution and Ngu's team.

Speaking at the Pleasanton ceremony, Dr Ansari observed that Lipid Sciences had found "a unique, optimised treatment that is highly effective, not only in delipidation, but also in reducing viral infectivity while appearing to retain a very high percentage of significant viral proteins".

But according to Prof Ngu, the Lipid Sciences team, including Dr Ansari, invited itself to Cameroon after it had seen the preliminary results of his work presented at a Vaccines Conference in Keystones, Colorado, in January 2002, by Dr Boma, one of Ngu's assistants. It is this presentation that led the two teams to signing the confidentiality and collaborative agreement in April 2002.

In fact, while in Yaounde on 12 June 2002, Dr Ansari had hailed Prof Ngu's work. He said he had come to have an on-the-spot assessment of Ngu's work. "We want details on the type of patients and how effective the vaccine can be," Ansari had said at the time. "I was motivated by initial data presented at a conference on Aids vaccines in Colorado last April. The results were quite interesting," he had added.

"My visit," he had continued, "has permitted me to actually see what is going on. I have talked with Prof Ngu on how we can collaborate with his team. I intend to come up with a protocol which will permit my university to work with Prof Ngu and his team on their Aids vaccine approach."

Ansari had added that the protocol permitting his company to collaborate with Ngu could only be signed after approval from Emory University and his country, the USA.

"After the signing of the protocol, we will see what form of technical assistance we can bring to the team," he had said. "We also intend to test [Ngu's] vaccine approach on about 40 patients. In this way, we will evaluate the situation of the patients before and after administration of the vaccine ... If found successful, it will be of great significance to the world, Africa and Cameroon in particular."

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He had added: "The success of the technique will be acknowledged - meaning the work of Prof Ngu will be internationally recognised. It will receive worldwide attention. Africa and Cameroon in particular will be honoured for the discovery, and Cameroonians will benefit because we will bring in the latest technology which can facilitate the whole procedure ...

"The vaccine is unique in that it is individualised. This means that it can be used as a vaccine for all types of HIV. Most of the vaccine trails we have today target specific types of HIV. There are many viral strains in Cameroon and the world as a whole. Such a vaccine will therefore be very good if it is developed. The vaccine also eliminates the HIV virus from the system and is not toxic."

It is against this background that Prof Ngu described as "dishonest" and a breach of the confidentiality and collaborative agreement claims made by Lipid Sciences on 3 December 2003 that it had, on its own, made a breakthrough in the development of a therapeutic vaccine approach for use against HIV.

"We were to collaborate and to maintain confidentiality," Ngu alleged. "We gave them our formula and all details. We even answered additional questions that Ansari asked afterwards.

"After they returned to America, Philip Radlick (then Lipid Sciences CEO who headed Ansari's team to Cameroon) wrote to me to say their board of administration did not allow them to collaborate with institutions outside the USA. They must have known this all along when they signed the agreement, but in their bid to obtain our secrets at all costs, they withheld this information from us. Having obtained what they wanted, they come out openly to repudiate the agreement."

But Lipid Sciences is not the only company in Ngu's black book. In January 2002, his lawyer, Mary Anchang, had signed a confidentiality pact with an eminent French professor who was head of research of a well-known institution in France.

But three months later, the French professor could not be found at the given address. He had apparently melted into thin air. However, a few months later, joint publications emanating from France and China appeared, using methods that were remarkably like Ngu's, and reporting good results.

Said Ngu: "It is obvious that some people-have borrowed without permission our discovery and will shortly claim it for themselves. Fortunately, we are still a few steps ahead."

He cited the case of four patients who received Vanhivax in 1989, 1992, 2001 and 2003. The first is doing well and living in Yaounde 14 years after. His viral count done in New York in 2000 was below counting levels. The second patient treated in 1992 is now living in Europe and is reported to have become sero-negative.

The third patient, treated from April 2001, has had an original viral count of 29,568 in April fall to below 50, and his previously positive serology had become indeterminate by December 2002.

The fourth patient received Vanhivax in January 2003 and his viral count fell from 17,300 to below 50 by April 2003.

In addition to these four cases, Ngu said Vanhivax had also brought relief to hundreds of others. Unfortunately, most of his patients do not want to be identified because of the fear of stigmatisation.

"There is indeed a hope for HIV," says Ngu. "The public at large must now be heavily involved. This is, after all, a pandemic that affects people without any distinction of class, tribe or political belief."

In the meantime, his legal adviser has said she was in contact with Ngu's legal representatives in the US to try to find ways of taking legal action against Lipid Sciences.

Incidentally, Ngu's case comes up at a time when the government of Cameroon has suspended scientific work on a vine recently discovered in the southwest of the country (called Ancistrocladus korupensis) which has properties to cure HIV and Aids.

But the vine contains toxic elements that kill human cells. So, Cameroonian scientists were working to find ways of eliminating the toxic elements when the government ordered the work to be suspended, alleging that some (unnamed) American research partners were using unscrupulous collaborators in Cameroon to harvest and illegally export the vine. The government feared that the Americans would have eventually claimed any drug manufactured from the vine for themselves.

(Readers can reach Prof Ngu on: Tel: [phone]. Mobile: [phone]. Fax: [phone]. Email: [e-mail] Website: www.vangu.8m.net or postal address: Laboratoire Clinique de L'Espoir, P.O. Box 1364, Essos-Nord, Yaounde, Cameroon).