Grant Progress Reports Available
Grant progress reports from all CAVD Principal Investigators are now available and will be updated as more reports are submitted. These report abstracts reflect the work being done by CAVD members; by sharing this information we hope to encourage the spirit of global access.
About the CAVD
The Collaboration for AIDS Vaccine Discovery (CAVD) is an international network of thirteen Vaccine Discovery Consortia (VDCs) and five Central Service Facilities (CSFs) funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to apply new technologies, concepts and approaches to the design of safe and effective preventive vaccines against HIV/AIDS. This collaborative effort was established in July 2006 with 16 grants from the Gates Foundation totaling $287 million over five years, with additional co-funding provided by the Fraunhofer Society and the Ministry of Economic Affairs of Saarland in Germany, and the Swiss State Secretariat of Education and Research. The CAVD is the first major contribution of the Gates Foundation to the Global HIV Vaccine Enterprise, an alliance of researchers, funders and advocates from academia, governmental and non-governmental organizations and private industry in developing and developed countries dedicated to implementing a shared scientific plan to accelerate HIV vaccine development. The CAVD is intended to address two of the top priorities identified in the Scientific Strategic Plan of the Enterprise: vaccine discovery and laboratory standardization.
The grants support a range of innovative approaches for designing an effective HIV vaccine, and focus on translational research by bridging a strategic gap between basic discovery and product development. The goals of the CAVD are to conduct collaborative research aligned with the Enterprise Plan; to design new candidate vaccines; and to improve and standardize immune response tests. The overall objective of this effort is to achieve at least one successful HIV vaccine.
Why utilize a collaborative structure?
To date, most HIV vaccine research has been conducted by small teams of investigators working independently. While important research gains have been made, there is growing recognition that these efforts need to be supported by new, large-scale, collaborative projects that can produce definitive answers to complex scientific questions.
The CAVD was conceived in the Enterprise spirit of: “Working in an open, collaborative fashion, sharing data and reagents in a collegial fashion, with the appropriate balance between productive competition and collaboration.” The philosophy behind linking the 16 grants in an alliance was to preserve the independent but complementary approaches of different independent research groups in order to stimulate innovation, while providing common tools and standardized preclinical and clinical lab platforms that facilitate comparative evaluation and information sharing to allow for an iterative process of knowledge-building and problem-solving.
CAVD members are also closely tied to other HIV vaccine research networks, including the HIV Vaccine Trials Network, The Dale and Betty Bumpers Vaccine Research Center, the Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Immunology, the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, EuroVacc, and grants made under the Grand Challenges in Global Health.