Thursday, 4:30 PM
Gates Foundation gives $287 million for AIDS vaccine, including $18 million in Boston
By Stephen Smith, Globe Staff
A Boston veteran of the two-decades-long quest for an AIDS vaccine received $18 million today from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation – part of an unprecedented private campaign to energize what has been a disappointing scientific endeavor.
Dr. Norman Letvin of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center will bolster efforts to develop a vaccine that triggers the destruction of human cells infected with HIV. His tools include the virus that causes the common cold.
Letvin's grant is among 16 showered on scientific teams across five continents by the Gates Foundation, which announced that it was investing a total of $287 million in AIDS vaccine research over five years. The grants constitute the biggest package of funding ever committed to AIDS research by the foundation, which is fueled by the fortune of the Microsoft founder and his wife.
The grants emphasize research into vaccines that will attack strains of the virus most common in Africa and South Asia, where the epidemic has imposed a disproportionate burden. Last year alone, HIV killed 2 million adults and children in sub-Saharan Africa, out of a worldwide total of 2.8 million.
"Developing an effective HIV vaccine has proven to be tremendously difficult, and despite the committed efforts of many researchers around the world, progress simply has not been fast enough," said Dr. Nicholas Hellmann, acting director of the Gates Foundation's HIV health program. "There still remain many unanswered scientific questions."
Solving the riddle of an AIDS vaccine, Hellmann said, will require an ethos of collaboration among scientists -- and the Gates Foundation money is intended to foster that. For example, all the funded researchers had to pledge to validate their results in a central laboratory, speeding up vaccine development.
"These grants really will help transform how HIV vaccine research is conducted over the next several years," said Mitchell Warren, executive director of the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, a consumer-driven interest group.
Vaccines discovered in the 20th century profoundly altered the deadly course of smallpox, polio, and other diseases.
But even with the dramatic advances in biotechnology during the past 20 years, HIV has proved to be a far more stubborn foe, due in no small part to the germ's ability to constantly alter its genetic profile, outwitting medications and vaccines.
"The key problem is that traditional ways of making vaccine, which have worked well against other diseases, have largely failed against HIV," said Dr. Giuseppe Pantaleo, a Swiss scientist who is presiding over another of the 16 research networks.
Those traditional approaches typically involve thwarting germs as they begin to attack. Letvin and his collaborators will continue to exploit a different aspect of the immune system: the body's ability to destroy its own cells after they have become infected.
"We have never before in medical science been faced with making a vaccine that generates this type of immune response," Letvin said.
Their vaccine strategy involves taking harmless genetic material from HIV -- which cannot spread the disease on its own, nor can it reach deep inside the human body by itself. To solve the delivery problem, researchers are trying to piggyback the HIV material on germs that normally cause the common cold or tuberculosis, but that have been engineered so they don't cause disease.
This vaccine method would benefit both the person who is infected and anyone exposed by that person. The lower the amount of virus circulating in the blood, the lower the chance that the virus can be transmitted.
While Letvin is the only researcher in New England to be named director of one of the 16 research teams, scientists affiliated with Beth Israel Deaconess, Harvard Medical School, and the University of Massachusetts Medical School are participating in other consortiums receiving Gates support.
"We hope," Letvin said, "to move from the top of the laboratory bench into the arms of human volunteers in trials within this five-year period of time."
Stephen Smith can be reached at stsmith@globe.com.
