NIH said it awarded US$31 million in first-year funding to Duke University and Scripps Research Institute to lead a new consortium: the Centers for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Immunology & Immunogen Discovery (CHAVI-ID). The funding is from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health. The initiative is projected to receive up to US$186 million or more over the next six years with a goal “to accelerate HIV vaccine development by supporting multidisciplinary research into immune responses that prevent or contain HIV infection and generating model vaccine components that can induce these protective immune responses.” CHAVI-ID is described as a consortium of researchers at universities and academic medical centers which will build on advances made in several laboratories, including the Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Immunology (CHAVI) based at Duke. CHAVI’s seven-year funding award from NIAID ended in June. NIAID Director Anthony S. Fauci, M.D. commented, “In recent years, considerable progress has been made in identifying antibodies that can prevent a broad range of HIV strains from infecting human cells. CHAVI-ID will attempt to understand how those antibodies and other immune responses work to protect against HIV infection, providing scientists with a rational foundation for designing what we hope will be an effective HIV vaccine.”

More at: http://www.nih.gov/news/health/jul2012/niaid-13.htm