US awards grants to study AIDS vaccines
Does any body know if Aronex got any of this grant
money? In the last report from Aronex I thought their
dollars from grants were down. Did some looking around
on the NIAID site but there did not seem to be anything
new on their web site.
biz.yahoo.com
US awards grants to study AIDS vaccines
WASHINGTON, Sept 29 (Reuter) - The U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious diseases (NIAID) said on
Monday it had awarded nearly $12 million in grants for researchers to study new vaccines against the HIV virus that
causes AIDS.
The agency said 49 different researchers had won grants totalling $11.8 million.
It said they would be examining the proteins that coat the HIV virus in the hopes of finding a way to help the body better
recognize and attack it, looking for ways to genetically engineer animals so they can be used for vaccine tests, and trying
to better understand the body's immune response.
They will also work on developing new ways for analyzing the structure of the HIV virus in hopes of finding weak
points.
``The 48 grants we are funding will explore creative approaches to vaccine design and involve many investigators new
to AIDS research,'' Anthony Fauci, director of the NIAID, said in a statement.
A group of AIDS doctors have volunteered themselves as human guinea pigs for vaccine research but Fauci and other
say it is too soon for that. The volunteers want to try out a vaccine that uses an attenuated, or genetically weakened,
version of the virus.
``Traditional killed vaccine or live attenuated vaccine development methods are being pursued, but may not be the most
successful for HIV,'' David Baltimore, an AIDS researcher who is about to become president of the California Institute
of Technology, said in the same statement.
``To discover the best way to tame HIV infection, we need also to focus on the newer biomedical technologies and
approaches that depart from the conventional.'' |
