Gates Foundation commits $287M for AIDS vaccine
(AP)
Updated: 2006-07-20 11:48
SEATTLE - The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced it is
awarding $287 million (euro230 million) in grants over five years to create an
international network of scientists to speed up the development of an AIDS
vaccine.
The collaboration is critical to making HIV vaccine development
more efficient, said Dr. Nicholas Hellmann, acting director of the Gates
Foundation's HIV, TB and reproductive health program.
"Unfortunately,
developing an effective HIV vaccine has proven to be tremendously difficult, and
despite the committed efforts of many researchers around the world, progress
simply has not been fast enough," he said Wednesday.
Hellmann
acknowledged that an effective vaccine may still be 10 years away.
Each
of the 165 investigators in 19 countries who will get money in this series of
grants had to agree to share their findings in real time and compare results
with others - even if they had been working on competing projects in the past.
Historically, HIV vaccine research mostly has been conducted by small
research groups working independently, said Dr. Juliana McElrath, associate head
of the infectious diseases program at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
in Seattle and a lead researcher on one of the new grants.
"While
critical progress has been made, the HIV vaccine field has lacked a shared,
focused strategy," she said.
Five of the grants will pay for facilities
to test researchers' findings. The 11 grants going to research projects are
evenly split between groups seeking to find antibodies that will neutralize HIV,
the virus that causes AIDS, and researchers trying to find a way to elicit
cellular immunity. Hellmann said the ultimate vaccine may combine both
approaches.
Mitchell Warren, executive director of the AIDS Vaccine
Advocacy Coalition, complimented the Gates Foundation on the approach it was
taking, but warned against assuming that this is enough money to finish the
work.
"Funding for AIDS vaccine research is still short of what we
need," Warren said.
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