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Despite significant gains made by the scientific and medical communities to understand the HIV virus, an effective HIV/AIDS vaccine – the best hope for ending the epidemic – is still out of reach.

To accelerate the path to vaccine development, the ӳ����ý of MIT and Harvard recently teamed up with the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard to establish the – one-year, $100,000 grants designed to spark collaborations and to foster new scientific directions for scientists at both institutes. With funding contributed by both the ӳ����ý and Ragon, the grants aim to integrate approaches rooted in biomedical research with those emerging from the fields of physical science and technological engineering, and to create new cross-disciplinary synergies among faculty.

Through collaborative grant programs, like ENDHIV and the ӳ����ý’s Scientific Projects to Accelerate Research and Collaboration (SPARC), the institute invests in research throughout the greater Cambridge area that might not get funded through more traditional means.

"We're committed to supporting transformative biomedical research, both at the ӳ����ý and at our partner institutions,” said Eric Lander, president and director of the ӳ����ý. “Through the ENDHIV grant program, we hope to catalyze research into HIV immunotherapeutics and vaccines through close collaborations with our partners at Ragon."

The first ENDHIV grants have just been announced and will go to two collaborative teams of researchers:

Steven A Carr, Ph.D. (ӳ����ý) and Daniel Lingwood, Ph.D. (Ragon Institute)
Project: “BCR Triggering by Sialyl-oligosaccharide Crosslinking to Enhance Antibody Responses to HIV”

Alon Goren, Ph.D. (ӳ����ý) and Boris Juelg, M.D., Ph.D. (Ragon Institute)
Project: “Understanding the Epigenetic Programming of Long-lived Vaccine Induced B-cell Immunity”

The team led by Carr, director of the ӳ����ý’s Proteomics Platform, and Lingwood will focus on adjuvants, which are vaccine components employed to enhance the vaccine’s ability to induce protection against infection.

The team led by Goren and Juelg will focus on vaccine development, particularly the durability of vaccine-induced immune responses.

“With support from the ENDHIV grant, we can examine what controls the length of immunization after vaccination, specifically epigenomic factors [those that do not modify DNA but influence gene activity], and yield insight for designing improved vaccines in the future,” said Goren, a group leader in the ӳ����ý Technology Labs.

For more on the Ragon Institute and the , visit their .