By: Warren King

SEATTLE - Twenty years ago, as the growing AIDS epidemic was sweeping the world, Rod Fichter and a friend got devastating news: They were both HIV-positive. At the time, more than 16,000 Americans a year were dying of AIDS, and no drugs to treat it had been approved. "I really thought it was a death sentence," Fichter said. In fact, in a few years his friend was dead.

Not Fichter. To his amazement, he never had a single symptom. He still hasn't. his immune system is fine; he has never needed AIDS drugs. It turns out that Fichter is among about 5% of all HIV-positive "controllers" - people whose bodies naturally keep the virus at extremely low or even undetectable levels.

"Living one day at a time became years at a time," says the 55-year-old former Air Force pilot and manager for Ameriflight, an air-cargo company.

Fichter is among 2,000 controllers worldwide whose entire genetic makeup's will be carefully examined by an international team of scientists as part of the quest to discover an AIDS vaccine or perhaps better drugs to fight the epidemic. The hope is that somewhere deep in the controllers' genomes lies an explanation of their special ability to keep the virus at bay.

"It's a fishing expedition," concedes Julie McElrath, an HIV researcher at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, who is directing Seattle's part of the Harvard-based project. "We know there is something to be learned from these, and it will take the brute force of having this many subjects to see any patterns."

It isn't the first time scientists have zeroed in on longtime HIV patients who have never taken HIV drugs and yet stayed healthy. Already they have learned that some HIV carriers have a genetic abnormality that causes a defect in the portal, or receptor, that allows the virus to enter vulnerable immune cells. And they found that others whose immune cells have certain proteins on their surfaces also fare well against HIV.

But neither of those is universal among long-term survivors. So researchers at 15 institutions worldwide will be looking for other factors, or combinations or factors, that keep the virus from causing AIDS. Half the controllers in the study are "viremic" - they have 2,000 or fewer viruses per deciliter of blood instead of the 10,000 to 100,000 viruses for a typical patient on medication. The other half are "elite" - about 50 or fewer viruses per deciliter. Elites are the rarest of the rare, making up about 1 in 300 HIV patients.

Over the next three to five years, the HIV Elite Controller Study will compare the genes of both types of controllers against 2,000 typical HIV patients with much higher levels of virus. About 300 controllers have been recruited so far for the project's first phase. They will soon be matched with more typical patients for comparison, says Florencia Pereyra of the Partners AIDS Research Center at Harvard.

Fichter is happy to be a viremic controller. It has meant years of life that he never expected to have. He loves his work, and he strides through the Ameriflight offices above a hangar, showing off photos of his former Air Force airplanes and his company aircraft. He travels with his longtime partner. They work together on their house. "I've just wanted to be as normal as I could be," he says. "I've just kept plugging along."

These days he thinks about HIV only occasionally, usually when he gives blood for the study every six weeks or so. But the research is important to him. "I feel like I should give something back to all the folks we've lost," Fichter says, his eyes briefly welling with tears. "I hope they can find something they can use to help others."

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HIV-positive, but few viruses
Twenty years ago, as the growing AIDS epidemic was sweeping the world, Rod Fichter and a friend got devastating news: They were both HIV-positive. At the time, more than 16,000 Americans a year were dying of AIDS, and no drugs to treat it had been approved. "I really thought it was a death sentence," Fichter said. In fact, in a few years his friend was dead. Read more...