Leaders with the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) recently received grant awards from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to accelerate AIDS vaccine development.
The funds, amounting to a total of $60 million over the next three and a half years, will finance the development of potential AIDS vaccines as well as other biomedical HIV prevention tools.
"Accelerating the translation of innovative research into promising vaccine candidates for clinical testing is a real urgency,” Mark Feinberg, president and CEO of IAVI, said. “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. 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."
With these awards, IAVI will offer additional services for regulatory affairs, preclinical development, project management, data analysis, manufacturing, quality assurance and clinical-trial implementation to a variety of investigators. This is made possible with the Collaboration for AIDS Vaccine Discovery (CAVD), which is designed to speed the development of AIDS vaccines or biologics.
