NIH awards $81 million for HIV vaccine research (10027)

+-KT??onal Institutes of Health on Monday awarded $81 million in grants to four biotechnology companies working on HIV vaccine development, The Washington Post reports. The grants were awarded to AlphaVax of Research Triangle Park, N.C.; Novavax of Columbia, Md.; Epimmune of San Diego; and Progenics Pharmaceuticals of Tarrytown, N.Y. The grants were administered through the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases' HIV Vaccine Design and Development program. The grants will be used to develop vaccines using nonreplicating alphavirus to deliver HIV proteins into the body; to identify key HIV proteins than can produce an immune response to invading virus after inoculation; to develop new classes of HIV vaccines for pre-clinical research; and to develop and test a vaccine that uses an altered form of HIV's outer envelope to prompt an antibody attack on the virus.