Progress in the Fight Against AIDS and HIV Thirty years after
the first report of AIDS, there's plenty of news about efforts
to create vaccines that protect against HIV infection and boost
the immune systems of people already infected. (Chris
Hondros/Getty Images) Novel HIV-Vaccine Candidate? Another major
effort includes the early research dollars that the National
Institutes of Health and the Gates Foundation are providing to
the University of Maryland for entirely new vaccine concepts
based on other scientific ideas. The funding was awarded to the
university's Institute of Human Virology, headed by the renowned
Robert C. Gallo, M.D., who helped discover the human
immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS and later developed the
HIV blood test. If effective, the novel HIV-vaccine candidate
would neutralize "many different strains of HIV." Previous
vaccine candidates responded only to a single type of the
disease. "With the possibility of an HIV vaccine that could
prevent many different strains of this disease