AIDS Researcher Wins VA’s Middleton Award

WASHINGTON – Dr. Douglas D. Richman, a virologist at the San Diego Healthcare System of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), whose research on HIV and AIDS has helped guide treatment for millions of patients worldwide, will receive the 2002 Middleton Award, VA’s highest honor for biomedical investigators. 

“Dr. Richman is an internationally recognized leader in HIV and AIDS research,” said Secretary of Veterans Affairs Anthony J. Principi. “His research is directly responsible for major advances in the medical treatment of people with AIDS and HIV.”  

Richman, director of the Research Center for AIDS and HIV Infection at the San Diego VA and the Center for AIDS Research at the University of California, San Diego, is noted for his studies of zidovudine, or azidothymidine (AZT), the first drug approved in the United States to treat HIV.  He and colleagues established the effectiveness of the drug in clinical trials in the late 1980s.  Later studies by Richman revealed the emergence of AZT-resistant strains of HIV.  The appreciation of the importance of HIV drug resistance and his pioneering studies of combination therapy led to the development in the 1990s of highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART).

Today, Richman continues to play a major role in setting the national agenda for AIDS research and care.  Recent research by Richman showed that more than three-quarters of HIV patients in the United States with a measurable viral load carry strains of the virus that are resistant to drug therapy.  The study underscored the need for drug resistance testing, which helps identify which medications will be effective for a patient.  Richman has also shown that HAART does not completely eradicate HIV, but leaves small reservoirs of HIV in immune cells—even when blood tests show no trace of the virus.  

Amid these findings, Richman is in the forefront of efforts to study neutralizing antibody to HIV, which may be of particular importance in the development of an AIDS vaccine.

Richman is author of more than 450 articles in the medical literature and is co-editor of the textbook Clinical Virology.  He has served on the editorial board of 15 journals and is editor-in-chief of Topics in HIV Medicine and AIDS Therapy.  He is an advisor to the Food and Drug Administration and the World Health Organization, and serves on the AIDS Vaccine Research Committee of the National Institutes of Health.  Richman is also a member of the Executive Committee on HIV for VA’s Quality Enhancement Research Initiative (QUERI).

VA established the Middleton Award in 1960 to honor William S.  Middleton, MD, an educator and physician-scientist who served as VA’s chief medical director from 1955 to 1963.  The award is given each year to a senior VA investigator for major achievements in areas of prime importance to VA’s research mission.

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