July 21, 2005
Researchers earn federal grant for HIV/AIDS vaccine immunology work
Four Harvard Medical School faculty – including Dana-Farber's Joseph Sodroski, MD – will serve in leadership roles within the Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Immunology (CHAVI), a virtual consortium of universities and academic medical centers established last week by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Joseph Sodroski, MD will serve in a leadership role within CHAVI
The center's goal is to address major obstacles to HIV vaccine development and to design, develop, and test novel HIV vaccine candidates.
Two of the four senior scientific leadership positions will be filled by Sodroski and Norman Letvin, MD, HMS professor of medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Barton Haynes, MD, a professor at Duke University Medical Center, will head the initiative, and these leaders will be responsible for the overall scientific work conducted by CHAVI. They will direct CHAVI research in their own labs and may also form research partnerships between CHAVI and other academic and industrial labs around the world.
"I look forward to interacting with an exceptional group of scientists to address a major challenge to world health, the continued spread of HIV," says Sodroski, whose Dana-Farber laboratory has sought to understand how the human immunodeficiency virus enters at the molecular level, and how neutralizing antibodies interfere with that entry.
Three of the center's five research core activities will be filled by Stephen Harrison, PhD, HMS professor of biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology and of pediatrics at Children's Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School; Raphael Dolin, MD, HMS dean for Academic and Clinical Programs and professor of medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital and BIDMC; and by Letvin.
CHAVI researchers will focus on: solving several unanswered questions about HIV, including how it infects the body in its earliest stages; designing, developing and testing improved vaccines; and evaluating promising HIV vaccine candidates in small-scale clinical trials. The center also plans to fund a large-scale study to determine how the immune system of the macaque monkey fends off SIV, the macaque equivalent of HIV.
According to the NIH, the consortium will receive $15 million in its first year and may receive more than $300 million in the next seven years. The award aims to transform HIV research in the United States into a cooperative and collaborative system.
The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, established CHAVI in response to recommendations of the Global HIV Vaccine Enterprise, a virtual consortium endorsed by world leaders at a G-8 summit in June 2004. The consortium was originally proposed in a June 2003 commentary in Science magazine by NIAID director Anthony Fauci, Haynes, and almost two dozen other prominent HIV vaccine researchers and public health officials.
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, according to global health experts, an effective HIV vaccine would be an extremely valuable addition to the comprehensive prevention strategies necessary to halt the spread of HIV in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Eastern Europe, as well as other parts of the world.
In addition to the Haynes and the HMS researchers, the CHAVI senior scientific leaders include George Shaw, MD, PhD; of the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine; and Andrew McMichael, MD, of Oxford University, Oxford, UK. The two other core roles will be filled by David Goldstein, MD, of Duke University; and Myron Cohen, MD, of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
CHAVI will be a "virtual consortium" consisting of a collaborative group of scientists at multiple sites – research centers, universities and companies – around the world. In future years, CHAVI may also solicit and support high-priority new ideas and discovery efforts from the research community.
