The Food and Drug Administration has warned organizers of clandestine tests on a promising AIDS drug derived from a Chinese cucumber that it will not tolerate any more secret trials, officials said Wednesday.
In a letter this week to Martin Delaney, co-director of Project Inform, FDA officials cautioned the San Francisco group to "discontinue further unapproved experimentation."But in a conciliatory move, the FDA offered to help Project Inform design authorized tests of the drug, commonly called Compound Q.
GLQ223, or Compound Q, is a highly purified version of an abortion drug used in China. It has been shown to selectively kill AIDS-infected cells in the test tube. It is derived from the root tuber of a cucumber.