Gates Foundation Pledges Up to $360M Over Five Years for Global HIV/AIDS Vaccine Enterprise
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has pledged as much as $360 million over five years to support an "array of innovations" aimed at progressing the development of an HIV vaccine, the Wall Street Journal reports. The Gates Foundation is "a driving force" behind the Global HIV/AIDS Vaccine Enterprise, an alliance of independent organizations that hope to "speed" HIV vaccine development, according to the Journal (Wall Street Journal, 2/17). The enterprise was formed in June 2004 by leaders from the Group of Eight industrialized nations at a summit on Sea Island, Ga. (Kaiser Daily HIV/AIDS Report, 1/19). The Gates Foundation on Tuesday also pledged approximately $337,000 to an upcoming conference on HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria to be held March 22-24 in Nairobi, Kenya, IRIN/AllAfrica.com reports (IRIN/AllAfrica.com, 2/16). The conference, titled "A Time to Heal: Vaccines and Drugs for Africa's Disease Burden," will be organized by the Africa Genome Initiative and led by Nobel laureate David Baltimore. According to AGI Interim Director Wilmot James, the Gates Foundation pledge will be used to set up the conference and release information on the discussions held during the event. "There are no vaccines for malaria or HIV/AIDS and no effective vaccine for tuberculosis. The conference will look at the science of vaccine development and finding vaccines for the three killer diseases," James said (Hartley, Mercury, 2/16).
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