IAVI Awarded Grants to Expedite AIDS Vaccine Development

The International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) has recently been awarded two new grants by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to expedite the development of promising AIDS vaccine candidates and other new biomedical HIV prevention tools. The grants provide for funding in an amount of almost US$60M over three and a half years.

Under these awards, IAVI will provide extended services in pre-clinical development, regulatory affairs, data analysis, project management, quality assurance, manufacturing and clinical-trial implementation to a broad range of investigators through the Collaboration for AIDS Vaccine Discovery (CAVD) to expedite the development of around a dozen promising AIDS vaccine candidates or biologics toward clinical testing.

“Accelerating the translation of innovative research into promising vaccine candidates for clinical testing is a real urgency. With more than 2 million people becoming infected with HIV in 2015 alone there is no time to lose. Collaborative and efficient AIDS vaccine development today means more lives saved in the future,” says Mark Feinberg, President and CEO of IAVI. “We are very pleased to expand the provision of vaccine product development expertise to support Gates Foundation-sponsored AIDS vaccine programs. The Gates Foundation has been a long-standing partner in this critical work of IAVI.”

The new awards build on initial awards granted in 2013 to establish key product development services at IAVI for the CAVD with an original slate of three to five proposed pilot projects. However, the support rapidly expanded to a current total of 17 projects.

In August 2016, IAVI was awarded a contract from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) to provide product development services to advance the development of AIDS vaccine candidates of NIAID-supported scientists.