than 25 million people and more than 40 million are infected today with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. The spread has been worldwide but it is the developing world that is now bearing the brunt of the epidemic with 95% of the new infections. Despite increasing efforts at prevention and treatment, the epidemic, continues to accelerate. This year, according to UNAIDS, has seen the largest number of deaths to date, more than 3 million, with more than 5 million new infections. With 14,000 new infections a day, HIV is already reversing decades of progress in these developing countries and has the potential to be even more catastrophic. Only a vaccine has any hope of ending the AIDS epidemic, yet through the mid-1990s AIDS vaccine work was limited on the world’s richer nations, and even this work had slowed to a standstill. In 1996 I founded the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI), a public-private partnership to advance the development of HIV vaccines for use globally, and particularly in the areas most affected by HIV and AIDS. IAVI faced great skepticism that a non profit could advance vaccine research and development. Yet only four years later, in August 2000, British physician and parliamentarian Evan Harris became the first person to be vaccinated with an HIV vaccine designed for Africa, using strains of the virus circulating in that region. In 2001, trials of this product began in Kenya, the first time an AIDS vaccine was tested in that country. The vaccine turned out to be ineffective—but IAVI’s model of working with academia, governments, and companies to speed product development and ensure an international focus was clearly effective. Today IAVI, a fully integrated vaccine development effort managed by experienced industrial project managers, is the second largest global program in HIV vaccine research and development, with more than forty active R&D relationships. IAVI has successfully translated innovative technologies into seven novel vaccine candidates that have entered human trials in the last six years, and has conducted clinical studies at 15 trial sites located in 11 countries. The Seth Berkley