Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2009. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
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The New York Times - January 26, 2009
Dennis Hevesi
Martin Delaney in 1997 at the organization he helped to create.
The cause was liver cancer, said Dana Van Gorder, executive director of Project Inform, an AIDS advocacy organization based in San Francisco that Mr. Delaney helped found in 1985.
Mr. Delaney, who was never H.I.V.-positive, was drawn into the AIDS movement in the early 1980s when several of his friends became infected and died.
When he heard about a cold remedy, ribavirin, that was being smuggled from Mexico because it had been found to help strengthen the immune system, Mr. Delaney made a several smuggling runs to Tijuana. Soon after, he decided he could be more effective by taking political action.
Project Inform started what Mr. Delaney called "medically supervised guerrilla trials" - community-based studies of the safety and efficacy of drugs, like ribavirin, that did not have federal approval. It sponsored town-hall-style information meetings around the country and set up a national AIDS-treatment hot line.
Mr. Van Gorder said, "Marty and Project Inform challenged the research and pharmaceutical community in the earliest years of the epidemic to consult with H.I.V.-positive patients and their advocates" about treatment options.
Mr. Delaney was a central figure in Jonathan Kwitny's book "Acceptable Risks" (Poseidon Press, 1992), which discusses the debate about whether terminally ill patients should have access to promising but unproven drugs. "Who should decide which risks are acceptable," Mr. Delaney is quoted as asking in the book, "the bureaucracy in Washington or the patient whose life is on the line?"
By the early 1990s, Mr. Delaney was a leader in efforts to push the Food and Drug Administration to approve promising drugs more speedily.
The campaign helped prompt the drug agency to issue regulations allowing experimental drugs to be provided to seriously ill people before the drugs received federal approval.
Martin Edward Delaney was born in Boston on Dec. 9, 1945. He is survived by a sister, Lois Delaney-Ogorek, and three brothers, William, Donald and Michael.
Last week, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a division of the National Institutes of Health, gave Mr. Delaney its Director's Special Recognition Award for "extraordinary contributions to framing the H.I.V. research agenda."
He was a member of the institute's AIDS Research Advisory Committee from 1991 to 1995.
In a statement, the institute's director, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, said, "Millions of people are now receiving life-saving antiretroviral medications from a treatment pipeline that Marty Delaney played a key role in opening and expanding."
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