UAB Chosen to Participate in $300 Million Research Effort to Find an HIV Vaccine

The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) is one of four institutions that will make up a new virtual Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Immunology (CHAVI). The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health, today announced it will award the consortium, led by Barton Haynes, M.D., of Duke University, more than $300 million over the next seven years. The aim is to address key roadblocks to HIV vaccine development and to design, develop and test new HIV vaccine candidates.

BIRMINGHAM, AL — The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) is one of four institutions that will make up a new virtual Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Immunology (CHAVI). The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health, today announced it will award the consortium, led by Barton Haynes, M.D., of Duke University, more than $300 million over the next seven years. The aim is to address key roadblocks to HIV vaccine development and to design, develop and test new HIV vaccine candidates.

In addition to Haynes, scientific leaders for the center are George Shaw, M.D., Ph.D., Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and professor of medicine at UAB; Norman Letvin, M.D., of Harvard University; Joseph Sodroski, M.D., of Harvard University; and Andrew McMichael, M.D., of Oxford University, England. Leaders will direct the overall work of the center, including research done in their own labs and collaborative partnerships between the center and other institutions around the world.

“Despite the best efforts of scientists worldwide, an effective HIV vaccine still eludes us,” Shaw said. “The CHAVI initiative will focus substantial resources on what will truly be a collaborative international effort, rather than on many individual projects, and this we believe will speed the discovery process.”

Collaborators joining Shaw in the research effort at UAB are Beatrice H. Hahn, M.D., professor of medicine and co-director of UAB’s Center for AIDS Research, and about 20 additional scientists and administrative staff in their laboratories. Hahn will direct an international team of CHAVI scientists who will evaluate the genetic sequence diversity of HIV and its implications for vaccine development.

More than 65 million people have been afflicted with HIV/AIDS globally, and this number is predicted to exceed 100 million by the year 2010, according to the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS. “New infections will affect an ever increasing number of people in diverse populations worldwide,” Shaw said. “Multiple, overlapping prevention strategies are critical for stemming the spread of HIV/AIDS, but ultimately — and sooner rather than later — what we need is an effective vaccine. That is the singular goal of the CHAVI, and it is a great privilege and a great responsibility for us at UAB to have been selected to participate in this critically important mission.”

CHAVI will focus on:

  • Understanding what happens in the earliest stages of HIV infection and what events take place in the immune system soon after HIV enters the body. Scientists know little about these events but they are believed to hold clues that will be essential to the development of a successful HIV/AIDS vaccine.

  • Using new research tools to determine how the immune system of the macaque monkey fends off SIV, the equivalent of HIV in monkeys. This will be a large study, and before now, resources for such a study have not been available. Scientists expect to gain valuable information from this study that could help in designing vaccines to protect humans from HIV.

  • Designing, developing and testing improved HIV vaccines that can stimulate persistent long-term immune responses, particularly at the body’s mucosal surfaces — those found at the entryways into the body, such as the genitals and mouth, where HIV transmission takes place — and in the blood.

  • Evaluating promising HIV vaccine candidates in small-scale clinical trials.

More information on is provided in an online Q&A: www.niaid.nih.gov/Newsroom/Releases/chaviqa.htm.