Luc Montagnier | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

1932-

French Virologist

Since 1972 Luc Montagnier has headed the Viral Oncology Unit of the Pasteur Institute.Under his leadership, in 1983 this unit discovered the retrovirus later named the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV-1) and identified it as the causative agent of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). Two years later Montagnier's team isolated the second-known human AIDS virus, HIV-2. Montagnier has established an international network of researchers to study the AIDS pathogenesis (how the disease originates and develops). He is convinced that such knowledge will lead to the development of a vaccine against this fatal disease, which now effects millions of individuals worldwide.

Montagnier studied both medicine and biology at the University of Poitiers and then at the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1957 he decided on a career in virology and spent four years doing research in the United Kingdom. His early work focused on the relationship of viruses and oncology, the formation of cancer tumors. He was the first to show that during the reproduction of a virus inside a cell, its RNA takes the form of a double helix very similar to the DNA double helix. In early 1964 Montagnier developed a test in vitro (outside the body) showing the carcinogenic power of a virus.

Such successes led to his appointment in 1972 as the head of the newly created Viral Oncology Unit of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, where he concentrated his research on antiviral defenses. Viruses are molecular parasites in the cell and use the cell's mechanisms for transmitting their genetic messages. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s Montagnier continued to work on RNA tumor viruses. He did extensive research on the interferons (small proteins) that are produced in viral-infected cells and that signal neighboring cells to produce enzymes that curb viral multiplication.

Montagnier also began research on human retroviruses. A retrovirus is a RNA virus that makes a DNA copy of itself in the host cell. This copy is incorporated into the host's DNA. The cell then makes more copies of the virus that spread to other cells. Some retroviruses cause very slow, degenerative diseases; they are known as lentiviruses or retrolentiviruses. This research put Montagnier in a key position when AIDS became an epidemic in the mid-1980s, since AIDS is a disease caused by a retrolentivirus that devastates the body's immune system.

In 1983 Montagnier's team isolated the retrovirus that causes AIDS. He also discovered that the virus at first does not openly attack the infected individual but apparently remains dormantfor a lengthy period. After that dormancy the virus suddenly becomes active and destroys the body's immune system. The patient dies from a wide variety of diseases, such as pneumonia and tuberculosis, against which his/her body no longer has defenses. In 1985 Montagnier's Pasteur team discovered a second AIDS virus.

Montagnier became involved in a bitter controversy with Dr. Robert Gallo (1937- ) of America's National Institutes of Health (NIH) over who first identified the AIDS virus and which country should receive royalties from AIDS-related tests and vaccines that might be developed. It was established in 1991 that the sample containing the virus Gallo claimed his laboratory had isolated, and which was used to develop a blood test for the disease, had been accidentally contaminated by a virus from a sample sent to him by the French. Montagnier is therefore recognized as the discoverer of the virus. After a long legal battle the Pasteur Institute and the NIH agreed in 1987 to joint ownership. In the previous year the initially identified virus was named HIV-1, and the second one isolated by Montagnier HIV-2. A person whose blood samples contain the virus but who has not yet developed the symptoms of AIDS is termed HIV-positive.

During the 1990s researchers learned that developing an effective vaccine against HIV willnot be easy. HIV mutates rapidly when attacked, so that drugs quickly lose their power as the virus mutates to a less vulnerable form. This mutation makes finding an HIV vaccine almost impossible. Montagnier thinks that, since bacterial factors increase the virulence of some animal lentiviruses, perhaps such a "cofactor" exists in the case of HIV that can be identified and destroyed. He has been concentrating his research efforts on mycoplasmas, tiny bacteria often associated with animal lentiviruses.

Each day, 16,000 people become infected with HIV and 7,000 people die because of AIDS. The United Nations estimates that AIDS is responsible for 5,500 deaths a day in Africa alone. Thirty-three million people are HIV-positive and at least sixteen million have died of AIDS. As the epidemic spreads to underdeveloped areas of Asia and Africa, Montagnier has become a world leader in encouraging AIDS prevention and treatment efforts. In 1993 he co-founded and became the president of the World Foundation for AIDS Research and Prevention.

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