By SUE VORENBERG Scripps-McClatchy Western Service August 26, 2002

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. - A potential AIDS treatment has been floating around in the most unusual place.

It has been clogging nuclear waste filters at the Department of Energy.

May Nyman, 35, a scientist at Sandia National Laboratories, accidentally discovered a material that can attach itself, like a tiny straitjacket, to the AIDS virus in the blood stream, rendering it unable to hurt other cells.

"It really was just an accident," she said. "It was just a matter of stumbling on to it, so to speak."

Nyman said she found the material while investigating filters designed to take radioactive portions out of liquid nuclear waste at South Carolina's Savannah River Site. The filters were clogging before a significant amount of material passed through them.

It turned out a manufacturing defect in the filtering material was gumming them up. Nyman found it, but she also thought the defect's crystalline structure was interesting, and decided to see if she could make a batch of it.

"I didn't have in mind any actual application when I synthesized it," she said. "It was just scientific curiosity. I just wanted to see if I could make it and see what it was."

The defect, which is a crystal made of the element niobium, is part of a class of materials that scientists call HPAs, or heteropolyanions.

The medical community has been interested in HPAs as a possible treatment for AIDS. Their unusual ability to bind with a virus makes it difficult for other cells to be attacked.

Most HPAs are stable only in acid solutions, and human blood is neutral. Nyman's HPA, however, is different. It is stable in neutral and basic solutions, meaning it could be ideal to trap viruses - including AIDS - in the human body.

Until Nyman learned how to manufacture the material - chemists call it niobium HPA - nobody knew how to make an HPA made entirely of niobium, Nyman said.

No medical research has been done yet with the new material, since its discovery was just announced this month in the journal Science.

But the idea of using Nyman's discovery for medical purposes is intriguing, said Craig Hill, an expert in HPAs and renowned chemistry professor at Georgia's Emory University.

Hill said Nyman's paper shows her discovery is more stable in basic liquids than neutral ones, but if niobium HPA remains stable in a neutral liquid for a sustained period of time it could have significant potential for AIDS treatment.

"If the thing has a lifetime of hours (in the blood) versus minutes or seconds, then it is very likely to have interesting anti-viral properties," he said. "There's a reasonable chance that its toxicity (ability to cause damage in the human body) may be fairly low."

Hill said he would be interested in testing the substance at Emory, which has tested more types of HPAs as a treatment for AIDS than any other research facility in the country.

Nyman said she was surprised to make such an unusual discovery so early in her career.

-- Anonymous, August 27, 2002

Answers

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-- Anonymous, August 28, 2002