Subject: Against the Odds, Paul Charlap Bets On an AIDS Drug Forsaken by Others 
Date: Published: 12/28/89 (83 lines)
Source:  Wall Street Journal.  Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc. 

    Who's News:
    Against the Odds, Paul Charlap Bets
    On an AIDS Drug Forsaken by Others
    ----
    By Richard Koenig
    Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

    E. Paul Charlap is soldiering in the war on AIDS.  
    At age 65, he has come out of semiretirement to try to
 salvage an experimental AIDS drug -- one that Du Pont Co. 
 already tested and dropped.
    Mr. Charlap, who has no background in medicine, "wants to
 do good," says Gabriel Carlin, formerly of Savin Corp., the
 office-copier company where Mr. Charlap was chairman.  "Also,
 a fair percentage of the time, he ends up making money."
    Last May, Mr. Charlap formed an investor group to buy 27%
 of HEM Research Inc., a closely held Philadelphia company
 that has certain rights to the drug, called Ampligen.  He and
 others invested a total of $1.5 million, which could prove to
 be cheap if Ampligen ever gets to market -- and dear if it
 doesn't, because the drug is HEM's only potential product.
    "I'm sticking my neck out," he says.  "I know that
 beautifully."
    Mr. Charlap, now serving as HEM's chief executive officer,
 confronts a legion of skeptics.  The company must first win
 U. S. approval for another big trial.  Then HEM will have to
 enroll enough doctors, many of whom scratched Ampligen off
 their lists because of its past failure.
    "I think this is a drug for which the scientific jury has
 made its informal verdict," says Daniel Hoth, director of an
 AIDS program at the National Institutes of Health.  The NIH
 still funds small safety tests of the drug, though.
    Ampligen, an anti-viral compound, first aroused interest
 in 1987.  Researchers reported that, in a 10-patient trial,
 the drug slowed progression of AIDS, or acquired immune
 deficiency syndrome, and alleviated early symptoms.  But in a
 follow-up, 334-patient trial, Ampligen flopped, performing no
 better than a placebo.
    Du Pont, which had bankrolled the big trial, then dropped
 its support of Ampligen.  The chemicals and energy giant also
 pulled out of a joint venture with HEM. 
    Mr. Charlap is backing a band of HEM researchers who
 advance a controversial theory:  that the potency of Ampligen
 was somehow diminished during the big trial by the way the
 drug was handled.  The theory centers on the plastic bags in
 which the drug was packaged; in the first trial, it had been
 packaged in glass bottles.  One thought is that the drug might
 have reacted with plasticizers in the bags.
    The researchers maintain that the few patients still
 taking Ampligen continue to do well.
    Du Pont contends that HEM's data aren't clinically
 significant.  Moreover, the company alleges in a lawsuit that
 HEM misled it about the drug's potential.
    Mr. Charlap's friends say he is simply acting as the man
 they know:  combative, always in motion and prone to longshot
 missions of mercy.  When years ago a Savin executive developed
 cancer, for instance, Mr. Charlap personally searched for a
 cure, traveling here and abroad.
    The role he has with HEM began early this year when he got
 a call from William Carter, a co-inventor of Ampligen and
 HEM's largest shareholder with about 23%.  The two had worked
 together before:  Mr. Charlap had once been a HEM director,
 and Dr. Carter had assisted in the cancer-cure search.
    Mr. Charlap says HEM can produce enough Ampligen for a
 large AIDS trial.  And smaller tests of the drug are under way
 against kidney cancer and an ailment called chronic fatigue
 syndrome.  But HEM by itself can't move the drug much further.
 So the search is on for a partner among European drug
 companies.
    Psychologically, he says, this is his toughest venture
 ever:  "You don't think I've stayed up at night wondering,
 `What if Du Pont is right?  ' I stay up.  But then I see what
 the drug has done for people, and I think what it could do,
 and I say, `Paul, you're doing the right thing.'"

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