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news.In an attempt to accelerate the development of a global HIV vaccine, the US National Institutes of Health has announced plans to offer around $300 million in funding for a new project involving a consortium of universities and academic medical centers.
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The NIH investment will help establish the Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Immunology (CHAVI), which will be led by Dr Barton Haynes, director of Duke University’s Human Vaccine Institute.
The consortium will receive more than $300 million over seven years, $15 million of which is designated for its first year. In its first year, CHAVI will develop an expansion plan that will undergo scrutiny by an external advisory group. CHAVI’s mission is to address key immunological roadblocks to HIV vaccine development and to design, develop and test novel HIV vaccine candidates.
“Despite a wide variety of approaches to HIV vaccine development by some of the world’s best scientists, we have not yet found a successful vaccine,” commented Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
“CHAVI will be a key component of the Global HIV Vaccine Enterprise that was proposed in 2003,” added Dr Fauci. “With this award, we are expanding the enterprise of HIV vaccine development beyond high-quality but separate research projects to a high-quality cooperative and collaborative research system.”
Approximately 40 million people are living with HIV/AIDS globally, and the rate of new HIV infections continues to exceed 13,000 per day, according to the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS.
Although AIDS drugs have extended the lives of many in wealthy nations, an effective HIV vaccine would be an extremely valuable addition to the comprehensive prevention strategies necessary to halt the spread of HIV in both developing and developed countries.
In the beginning the new project will look to gain a greater understanding of what happens in the earliest stages of HIV infection and what events take place in the immune system soon after HIV enters the body. Scientists know little about these events because identifying individuals at the earliest stages of infection has been extremely difficult.