San Francisco Chronicle - July 20, 2006
Sabin Russell, srussell@sfchronicle.com.

A package of five-year grants will be distributed among 16 research organizations that have pledged to coordinate their efforts to crack some of the difficult scientific mysteries that have blocked the development of a successful AIDS vaccine since the epidemic emerged a quarter-century ago.

The largest grant in the package from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, $33.3 million, will go to the National Institutes of Health's Dale and Betty Bumpers Vaccine Research Center, which ordinarily relies on the federal government for most of its funding.

Led by Dr. Richard Koup, the federal center will use the Gates money to develop an international network of laboratories that will use uniform ways to measure how the body's immune system reacts to potential AIDS vaccines.

Koup's organization will focus on a class of vaccines that are intended to work by training specialized blood cells to keep HIV in check by killing cells that have become infected -- a biological process known as cellular immunity.

A Duke University group led by researcher Dr. David Montefiori will receive a $31.5 million Gates grant to develop a similar international lab network to measure responses to vaccines that stir up antibodies to keep HIV from infecting cells in the first place.

"With 11,000 infections occurring every day, a preventive vaccine is our best long-term hope for controlling the AIDS epidemic,'' said Dr. Nicholas Hellmann, who directs HIV programs at the Gates foundation.

Nevertheless, the ability of HIV to mutate rapidly has defeated every effort to date to develop an effective way to immunize people against the virus. Hellmann conceded that an effective vaccine "is still probably at least 10 years away."

Although the grants are distributed among 115 researchers from 19 countries, a common theme in the Gates program is that all the recipients will standardize their measurements and share their data.

"The HIV vaccine field has lacked a shared, focused strategy,'' said grant recipient Dr. Juliana McElrath of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, in a telephone news conference. "We've lacked standardized tools to compare results."

Her group, which won a $30.1 million grant, will examine how immune stimulators known as adjuvants might boost the body's protective response against an invading virus.

Eleven of the award winners are working on efforts to develop vaccine candidates, using a variety of techniques. One will screen antibodies in the blood of a variety of living creatures, from human beings to llamas, to see if some might block HIV -- a method previously used to find drugs to treat diseases.

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