Gates spends $287 million on new AIDS vaccine push

WASHINGTON, July 19 - The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced $287 million in grants on Wednesday to create an international network of 16 labs to try new approaches to making a vaccine against AIDS.

The foundation says it wants the program to transform the so-far unsuccessful AIDS vaccine effort by rewarding individual labs that come up with innovative ideas and helping them develop those ideas, but also ensuring that they collaborate with other researchers, who under ordinary circumstances would often be considered rivals.

"This is the foundation's largest-ever investment in HIV vaccine development. In fact, it's our largest-ever package of grants for HIV and AIDS," Dr. Nicholas Hellmann, acting director of the Gates Foundation's HIV, TB, and Reproductive Health program, told reporters in a telephone briefing.

AIDS was first described in 1981 and the human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS was found soon after -- but it has proven extremely difficult to find a way to make an effective vaccine. The virus attacks the very immune cells that are usually stimulated by a vaccine, and mutates quickly to evade back-up immune responses. More than 30 vaccines are being tested in people now, but no scientists expect that any of them will prevent HIV infection in large numbers of people. The best hope with current approaches is to perhaps delay infection, or make the infection less destructive, in some people.

"Progress has simply not been fast enough," Hellmann said.

OLD AND NEW APPROACHES The 16 grants will go to more than 165 investigators in 19 countries, some of them top names in AIDS research and some less well-known. -- Robin Weiss of University College London and colleagues will use $25.3 million to look for antibodies -- immune system proteins -- in humans and animals that might help stop HIV. -- Timothy Zamb of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative and colleagues will spend $23.7 million to test various viruses to use as vectors, which carry a vaccine into the body. -- Leo Stamatatos of the Seattle Biomedical Research Institute and colleagues won $19.4 million to come up with computer design techniques to create synthetic molecules to trigger antibodies against HIV. -- Giuseppe Pantaleo of the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois in Lausanne, Switzerland, will use $15.3 million to look at the possibility of turning viruses related to smallpox into AIDS vaccines, including the first-ever vaccine made from a virus in the 18th century and which was used to eradicate smallpox by 1979. Others will examine ways to make vaccines more effective, while five labs will create central facilities to help the others share data and compare results. The researchers will be free to patent and profit from any findings but must agree to make any resulting vaccine freely available to people in the developing world. The AIDS virus infects close to 40 million people and 25 million people have died of AIDS since 1981. HIV kills 8,000 people a day, most in Africa and many of them women and children.

There is no cure, although drugs can help control the virus and can sometimes help prevent it from being passed along.