Gates Foundation to fund collaborative research for HIV vaccine

20 July 2006

Mumbai: The Bill and Melinda Gates (BMG) Foundation has announced a $287 million funding programme, involving 16 grants, to create an international network of collaborative research to develop HIV vaccine.

BMG will bring together 16 research teams and 165 investigators from 19 countries from the world over for development of the vaccine.

The grants will support innovative and effective research on HIV vaccine and try to tackle some of the biggest scientific challenges in AIDS research.

Eleven consortia will focus on vaccine discovery, applying new scientific knowledge and cutting-edge research techniques to create and evaluate novel vaccine candidates. These consortia will be linked to five central laboratories and data analysis facilities, enabling investigators to openly share data and compare results, and allowing the most promising vaccine approaches to be quickly prioritized for further development, the foundation said in a release.

"An HIV vaccine is our best long-term hope for controlling the global AIDS epidemic, but it has proven to be a tremendously difficult scientific challenge," said Dr Jose Esparza, senior advisor on HIV vaccines for the Gates Foundation. "We have all been frustrated by the slow pace of progress in HIV vaccine development, yet breakthroughs are achievable if we aggressively pursue scientific leads and work together in new ways," he added.

Most HIV vaccine research to date has been conducted by small teams working independently. While some gains have been made, these efforts lacked the type of support to make it large-scale and productive,