Dr. Barton Haynes, director of Duke’s Human Vaccine Institute and Frederic M. Hanes professor of medicine, has studied HIV/AIDS for 15 years and has no intention of stopping—especially now that he has the backing of the world’s eight leading industrialized, democratic nations and $300 million from the National Institutes of Health.
The funds will support the new Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Immunology, established July 14 by the National Institute of Allergy and Infection Diseases, a department of NIH. As the leader of the center, Haynes will coordinate an international consortium of HIV vaccine researchers.
The center’s objective is to design, develop and test potential HIV vaccines. It will use many of its resources to gain a greater understanding of the virus, especially its earliest stages of infection.
“This is an extraordinary opportunity because we won’t be resource-limited,” Haynes said. “But it’s also a lot of responsibility to make sure that we use these resources to move forward.”
In its first year, the center will receive more than $15 million from the NIAID, which anticipates committing as much as $49 million for each of the subsequent six years.
The center was created in response to a 2003 proposal presented by the Global HIV Vaccine Enterprise, a group composed of prominent HIV vaccine researchers from around the world, including Haynes.
Various world leaders supported the Enterprise’s recommendations at the June 2004 G-8 summit—a meeting of the leaders of the world’s eight most industrialized country.
“With the epidemic continuing unabated globally, not enough progress was being made,” Haynes said. “We need to go faster and include more countries.”
With a global focus—the senior leaders for the new center hail from Harvard University, University of Alabama and Oxford University—the center will establish clinical sites to find and study patients in the United States, England and Africa.
The international reach of the project is particularly important because HIV is rapidly evolving and viral diversity presents many problems for vaccine development. Haynes said these factors have made progress in developing a vaccine more difficult than he ever anticipated.
With Haynes as the head of the center, Duke continues to push forward with its institutional commitment to global health.
“This grant offers an unparalleled opportunity to perform innovative research that will lead to new design options for an HIV vaccine,” Dr. Victor Dzau, president and CEO of Duke University Health System and chancellor for health affairs at Duke, said in a statement. “With this intensive effort, we will make a substantial impact on global health.”
Dr. David Goldstein, visiting professor of molecular genetics and microbiology, will lead the center’s Host and Viral Genetics Core, one of the center’s five main research foci. “The focus of my group is on understanding how genetic differences among people influence their abilities to control the virus,” Goldstein wrote in an e-mail. “Understanding why some people naturally control the virus better than others can help to provide clues to the most profitable directions for vaccine development.”
The other four cores are the Structural Biology Core, the Acute HIV-1 Infections Network Core, the Clinical Core and the Vaccine Production Core. Dr. Myron Cohen from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and three doctors from Harvard Medical Center will lead the other core groups.
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