To support innovative research projects aimed at curing HIV, amfAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research, has awarded new Target Grants funding five of them in a single round for the very first time. This brings total funding for new grants and fellowships in recent months to more than $3.1 million. In an indication of the fierce competition among scientists for research support, especially in the wake of substantial cuts to federal funding of HIV research, amfAR received the highest number of grant submissions since 2005.

 

“All five of these outstanding research teams proposed innovative, well--supported and carefully crafted studies that received high marks from our grant reviewers,” amfAR’s incoming CEO Kyle Clifford said. “We are deeply grateful to the generous donors who make these grants—and the potential breakthroughs they could lead to—possible.”

 

The only successful HIV cure strategy to date has involved high-risk stem cell transplantation in 10 people living with both HIV and certain blood cancers and cannot be replicated on a global scale. An effective cure strategy needs to be scalable, accessible and applicable to the largest number of people possible. The new amfAR grantees are working on a range of approaches to eradicating HIV or controlling the virus in the absence of antiretroviral therapy while striving to fulfill these criteria. Each project is awarded $480,000 over two years.

 

The awardees are: Francesco Simonetti, MD, PhD, of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore; Rachel Rutishauser, MD, PhD, of University of California San Francisco, and Brad Jones, PhD, of Weill Cornell Medicine in New York; Mirko Paiardini, PhD, of Emory University in Atlanta; Sharon Lewin, PhD, of University of Melbourne in Australia, and Thumbi Ndung’u, PhD, of Africa Health Research Institute, South Africa; and Nadia Roan, PhD, of Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco, and Possu Huang, PhD, of Stanford University.