The Department of Biotechnology (DBT), Ministry of Science and Technology, and the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) signed an agreement today to address a major obstacle in AIDS vaccine development: the design of candidate vaccines to elicit neutralizing antibodies against HIV.

A new Indian Medicinal Chemistry Programme, co-sponsored and co-funded by IAVI and the DBT, will comprise top Indian and US scientists tasked with accelerating the pace of AIDS vaccine discovery and developing creative concepts for the next generation of AIDS vaccines.

Union Minister for Science and Technology and Earth Sciences Kapil Sibal said, that vaccine research is so critical that the Health Ministry and the Science and Technology Ministry have joined hands to provide the support it needs.

Expressing satisfaction over the collaboration, Dr Maharaj K Bhan, Secretary, DBT, said that only through these kinds of biotechnology ventures involving international collaborations and the sharing of scientific knowledge, we can hope to solve the complex biomedical problems of our times.

According to Seth Berkley, CEO and president of IAVI, this new partnership will broaden ongoing efforts in India to find an AIDS vaccine.

The Indian Programme will complement the work of IAVI's antibody consortium (NAC), a team of internationally recognized scientists working on the neutralizing antibody challenge. Researchers believe an ideal AIDS vaccine must evoke an antibody response that can block HIV from entering healthy cells, as well as reduce the amount of viral dissemination through a cell-mediated immune response to HIV-infected cells. Yet today, virtually all current vaccine candidates in the pipeline are based on cell-mediated immune responses alone, failing to target the second critical arm of the human immune system.

The first component of the DBT-IAVI programme will consist of a collaboration of principal investigators from different academic research laboratories to design novel HIV antigens. The investigators include Professor Virander S. Chauhan of the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, New Delhi; Professor Raghavan Varadarajan of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore; Dr. Stephen Kaminsky of IAVI's AIDS Vaccine Development Laboratory, New York; and Dr Philip Dawson of The Scripps Research Institute, California.

The DBT, established to give impetus to the development of the field of modern biology and biotechnology, made achievements in the growth and application of biotechnology in the broad areas of medical biotechnology and health care, agriculture, animal sciences, environment, and industry. DBT has more than 5000 research publications, 4000 post-doctoral students, several technologies transferred to industries and patents (including US patents) to its credit.

The International AIDS Vaccine Initiative is a global not-for-profit organization whose mission is to ensure the development of safe, effective, accessible, preventive HIV vaccines for use throughout the world. Founded in 1996 and operational in 24 countries, IAVI and its network of collaborators research and develop vaccine candidates.