Emory University will receive some $7 million as part of a seven-year project created by the National Institutes of Health with the goal of finding a vaccine against HIV and AIDS, the university announced today.

The Centers for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Immunology & Immunogen Discovery (CHAVI-ID) will be led by the Scripps Research Institute and Duke University but doctors and scientists from Emory, the Rockefeller University/Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Ragon Institute will contribute to the project.

“Despite the development of lifesaving drugs, the HIV/AIDS epidemic still remains a tremendous challenge, with 34 million infected individuals throughout the world. Our greatest hope for stopping this disease remains an effective vaccine,” said Rafi Ahmed, PhD, director of the Emory Vaccine Center and a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar.

“The intensive approach of CHAVI-ID will give us an excellent chance of accomplishing that.”

The goal of CHAVI-ID, Emory said, is “to accelerate HIV vaccine development by supporting multidisciplinary research into immune responses that prevent or contain HIV infection and by generating model vaccine components that can induce these protective immune responses.”

For more information, please visit http://www.whsc.emory.edu/home/about