To the editor:

Your June news feature, 'One for the money' by Apoorva Mandavilli, and accompanying editorial question the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Immunology (CHAVI) on two grounds: first, its cost, which may be on the order of $300 million over seven years; and second, its reliance on competitive bidding for leadership of the initiative, which has temporarily self-sorted the AIDS vaccine research field into at least four competing multidisciplinary teams—contrasting this to using these public research funds for a large number of RO1-type peer-reviewed investigator-initiated research grants.

The US government, through the NIH and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, has consistently funded the vast bulk of AIDS vaccine research, an amount that has increased from about $100 million per year when the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition (AVAC) was founded in 1995 to $530 million today, still only 20% of its AIDS research portfolio. This increase is justified by the enormous value a preventive HIV vaccine would have toward controlling an out-of-hand global catastrophe and because of a consensus that such a vaccine is feasible. In the process, they and others have spent at least a few billion dollars funding every reasonable idea and approach, bringing us to our current situation of testing vectored vaccines for cellular immunogenicity and efficacy. Should these fail or, more predictably, prove less than perfect in the next few years, it is hard to know where we would look next for better approaches. Hence CHAVI, a group effort to reduce that nagging uncertainty.

No one should be willing to give up on the prospect of an AIDS vaccine. And no one would underestimate the value of investigator-initiated research. But the NIH should not be criticized for trying something bigger, and new. The funding for CHAVI, $300 million over seven years, works out to be about 8% of this year's AIDS vaccine expenditures, which can be expected to increase in the coming years. Any government program has to be competitively bid, and already the competition to run CHAVI has generated surprisingly broader thinking than heretofore. And if the selected leaders don't engage the whole research community as CHAVI moves forward, that would be surprising. It will also be a terrific way to recruit new investigators into a very difficult and risky field with some coordination and leadership. That is the aim of the Global HIV Vaccine Enterprise, which may or may not succeed as an organizational solution to an intractable scientific problem. But not trying and hoping more of the same would give a different outcome would be foolishness for the scientific community and for humankind.