New Vaccine Strategy

Abstract

NEW DELHI— In a new approach to vaccine development, a U.S. university will dispatch faculty members to India to help run a new vaccine research center with Indian partners. Until now, U.S. researchers have spent only a few months at a time in India, says Altaf A. Lal, a malaria researcher with the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi. Emory University's School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia, will spend $3 million over 3 years to hire three faculty members for the Emory Vaccine Center, a joint venture with the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (ICGEB) in New Delhi. Tops on the center's list is developing a DNA vaccine against clade C of the HIV virus, developed by a team led by Emory University's Rama Rao Amara, a researcher running U.S. phase I clinical trials on a related virus. ICGEB Director Virander Singh Chauhan says the new center does not intend to use Indians as unwitting guinea pigs for new vaccines—an allegation that has dogged some of the more recent Indo-U.S. vaccine trials in India.