IAVI Extends Congratulations to Leading AIDS Vaccine Researchers

New York, July 11, 2012—The International AIDS Vaccine Initiative warmly congratulates The Scripps Research Institute and Duke University for winning major grants from the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) to support the design and development of preventive HIV vaccines. The Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Immunology & Immunogen Discovery (CHAVI-ID), a research consortium within NIAID, awarded each organization a multi-year grant to further explore the immune responses that prevent HIV infection or control the virus in infected individuals.

For more than 30 years, HIV has been a scourge that has infected more than 60 million people and claimed nearly 30 million lives. The HIV-prevention field has made great advances toward developing new tools to blunt the impact of the AIDS pandemic. The development and eventual deployment of a preventive AIDS vaccine will be an essential part of this prevention toolkit, eventually helping to end the pandemic.

“On behalf of IAVI, I applaud Dennis Burton of The Scripps Research Institute and Bart Haynes of Duke University as well as their research teams for securing such impressive grants from CHAVI-ID,” said Margie McGlynn, IAVI President & CEO. “Both Dennis and Bart have shown great leadership within the AIDS vaccine field, and their work continues to play a key role in advancing the development of an effective HIV vaccine. In recent years, the field has been revitalized by exciting progress, and I have no doubt that their teams will continue to build on this momentum.”