How Julio Montaner set the standard for AIDS treatment

published on August 12, 2014 in The Globe and Mail

Julio Montaner’s medical breakthroughs have helped save millions of lives. Many were inspired by one simple piece of advice from his father.

Dr. Montaner’s dad was a noted pulmonary specialist and expert on tuberculosis, which was a problem in their native Argentina. Julio Gonzalez Montaner told his son to treat the stubborn respiratory disease with a combination of drugs – one alone was not enough.

The younger Dr. Montaner leveraged this concept in the mid-1980s when, as a pulmonary specialist himself, working at St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver, he kept encountering patients suffering from a previously rare form of pneumonia.

He hypothesized that while these patients seemed to have suppressed immune systems, their immunity was also acting erratically – they had inflammation, too. He treated them with steroids to curb the inflammation, then antibiotics to zap the pneumonia infection. It worked.

As it became clear that these patients were also suffering from an underlying new disease that would eventually be labelled HIV/AIDS, Dr. Montaner went to a conference in California and shared his discovery. His approach quickly became the standard of care for pneumocystis pneumonia, which often affected people with HIV/AIDS.

Years later, as head of the hospital’s AIDS clinic and research program (launched in the late 1980s with Dr. Montaner as the only devoted employee, plus a half-time secretary), he realized his father’s golden rule might work again.

Dr. Montaner was treating his patients with azidothymidine (AZT), but it wasn’t slowing the disease enough, and the drug kept becoming resistant to the powerful virus. “Using the combination model, I started shopping around for another drug,” says Dr. Montaner. He began testing his patients with a combination of AZT and didanosine (DDI). Better, but not good enough.

Diane Peters
The Globe and Mail
Read The Full Story

View the full article >>

Tags:

Julio Montaner

BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS

Search form

How Julio Montaner set the standard for AIDS treatment

Search form