In May 1997, US President Bill Clinton challenged the scientific communityto develop an AIDS vaccine within a decade. This intensified effort includedthe creation of the Dale and Betty Bumpers Vaccine Research Center at theNational Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.

The new building for the centre is now all but complete and will be officiallyopened in spring 2001. The five-storey glass building, costing between $35million and $40 million, has around 5,100 square metres of space, four researchfloors, a Biosafety Level-3 (BL-3) containment facility, conference rooms,a vivarium and a cybercafé. It is open and airy, with lots of commonareas to facilitate interaction between staff, who — although drawnfrom an array of disciplines — are directed towards a common purpose.

“We really want to capture under one roof thedifferent aspects of vaccine science. Our investigators start as basic asX-ray crystallographers, and go as applied as AIDS vaccine clinical trialsspecialists, and everything in between,” says the centre's directorGary Nabel, whose own earlier research interests were in HIV gene therapyand DNA-based therapeutic vaccines for cancer.

Although the primary goal is to develop an AIDS vaccine, he says, "we dohave a broader mission, which is to advance vaccines for all diseases”.Nabel, for example, continues to work on developing a vaccine against theEbola virus. As he points out, what is learnt with other diseases could helpthe research into AIDS, and vice versa. The challenge in the early years,he says, will be in striking the right balance.

Jointly funded by the NIH's National Institute of Allergy and InfectiousDiseases and the National Cancer Institute, the centre had a bud get of $26million for fiscal year 2000, although “that number needs to rise aswe fill the centre”, Nabel says. It will focus on the preclinical andearly clinical stages of development and will work closely with the newlycreated HIV Vaccine Trials Network, which will conduct all phases of clinicaltrials and replaces the AIDS Vaccine Evaluation Group (AVEG) and the HIV Networkfor Prevention Trials.

Newly appointed clinical director BarneyGraham will be the centre's main link to the vaccine trials network, havinghad more than 10 years of experience with the AVEG. “We will conductearly-stage trials on the NIH campus, mainly so we can learn more scientificallyabout the immune responses in people, but there will be a passing of the batonfrom us to them as we identify our more promising candidates,” saysNabel.

The centre will also do research with non-human primates to glean “meaningfulinformation about protection, about the character of the immune responses,and any possible correlates in between,” says Nabel. What is learnedin humans and primates will then be used to choose vaccine candidates formore advanced clinical testing. The earliest candidates will probably be DNAvaccines, says Nabel.

Mario Roederer, director of the centre's flow cytometry laboratory —and, like almost all the core staff, recruited from outside the NIH —says the new post “gives me the opportunity to bring my technology toa much larger group of scientists, and to apply this technology to clinicalsettings, specifically clinical trials and vaccine trials”.

Even when all the key individuals are in place next spring, there willbe spare capacity to allow for future growth and visiting scholars. Althoughthere are no plans at this point to hire any more tenure-track researchers,there will still be a need to recruit staff scientists, postdocs and graduatestudents.

When asked whether he feels the clock ticking, Nabel says he sees the ten-yeartime frame more as a point by which the scientific community should be ableto say whether a vaccine is a viable approach to containing AIDS. “Myguess is that there will be some kind of a vaccine within that time-framebut I don't know whether it's going to be the optimal vaccine, because the[clinical] trials take so long.”

Vaccines beside gene therapy

Oregon Health Sciences University (OHSU) — noting that the toolsand resources needed for vaccine development have much in common with thoseof gene therapy — has established a new institute that will span bothareas, in a cooperative venture with the Oregon Regional Primate Center.

Although the university had staff with expertise in vaccine developmentand gene therapy, “the idea was to create a critical mass that wouldbe located in one place”, says Jay Nelson, director of the new Vaccineand Gene Therapy Institute, who has been recruiting heavily over the pastyear.

In February, the institute will move to a new $35-million building on OHSU'snew campus in Hillsboro. This will provide 1,800 square metres of laboratoryspace, 900 square metres of animal facilities, plus four BL-3 and eight BL-2containment facilities. The institute is next-door to both the primate centreand the Oregon Graduate Institute, which is merging with OHSU. Its strengthsin computational science and chemistry complement the functional-genomicsaspects of the new institute.

The first phase of recruitment for the new institute has been in vaccineresearch, with eight of nine core faculty slots already filled, and recruitmentcontinuing at the graduate, postdoctoral and research associate level.

The first new recruit was Louis Picker, director of the institute's vaccineprogramme. Picker, who studies T-cell biology in human and non-human primates,will be working on prophylactic and therapeutic vaccines against HIV, itsprimate equivalent (SIV) and cytomegalovirus. Klaus Früh, director ofthe institute's functional-genomics centre, will use approaches such as DNAmicroarrays, proteomics and laser-capture microscopy, to look at how virusesinfect cells.

The next phase of expansion for the institute will be to build up a programmefor gene therapy alongside the vaccine programme.

Gary Nabel is focusing research on AIDS. Credit: NIH
Work in progress: two new vaccine development institutes are hunting theelusive AIDS vaccine — the Vaccine and Gene Therapy Institute at OregonHealth Sciences University (top) and the National Institutes of Health VaccineResearch Center (bottom). Credit: OHSU/NIH