Scripps Research Institute has won a $30 million grant from the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative to create a new research center that will hunt for a new vaccine to guard against HIV. The IAVI is providing the money to build the first brick-and-mortar facility of its kind in La Jolla, CA. And Scripps will recruit a team of biologists, virologists, chemists, immunologists and computational biologists to do the work.
"Collaboration is essential to making things happen, so the more we bring people together to promote scientific interaction, the more rapid our progress will be toward the creation of an effective AIDS vaccine," said Dennis Burton, Ph.D., professor in The Scripps Research Institute Department of Immunology and Microbial Science.
"Finding a way to elicit neutralizing antibodies against HIV is the biggest challenge facing AIDS vaccine researchers today. IAVI is establishing the HIV Neutralizing Antibody Center at The Scripps Research Institute and expanding our Consortium to ensure that the best minds and institutions are dedicated to solving this problem," said Dr. Seth Berkley, president and CEO of IAVI.
- check out the release
ALSO: GenVec will receive up to $3.8 million from the NIAID to support the development of new HIV vaccine candidates based on its adenovirus vector and production cell line technologies. Genvec release