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After an 18-month search, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced last week that Gary Nabel, a professor of internal medicine and biological chemistry at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, is to become director of its new Vaccine Research Center.

Nabel: wants a more scientific approach to vaccine research.

In a statement, President Bill Clinton said that Nabel will be an “incredible” asset in the search for an AIDS vaccine — the centre's top priority. When he announced the creation of the centre in May 1997, Clinton called for the development of an AIDS vaccine within a decade (see Nature 387, 323; 1997).

The time it took to appoint a director has been criticized by activists such as Gregg Gonsalves, policy director at the Treatment Action Group, which lobbies for AIDS research. Also criticized is that Nabel, who developed the first gene therapy for HIV infection and has developed DNA-based vaccines for melanoma and Ebola virus, is not an experienced vaccinologist or immunologist.

But NIH director Harold Varmus described Nabel as “a superb scientist” who is “remarkably well prepared” for the job. And David Baltimore, president of the California Institute of Technology and head of NIH's Aids Vaccine Research Committee — and under whom Nabel has worked — calls the appointment “great”.

Nabel told Nature that he plans to develop a broad scientific understanding of immune responses to foreign proteins, allowing predictions of a candidate vaccine's effectiveness, as opposed to randomly picking candidates and hoping for the best. He also plans to stress the development of candidate vaccines to fill what is currently a nearly empty pipeline for phase-one clinical trials, and to work closely with industry.

His scientific priorities include assessing whether a successful vaccine can be developed using cytolytic T-cell immunity, and developing approaches that enhance the production of neutralizing antibodies.

Nabel says he believes that his strengths do lie in vaccinology and immunology. “What I have not done is work in industry on vaccine development.”