The International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) announced today that it has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Ragon Institute to accelerate the development of new and promising AIDS vaccine candidates for testing.
Formed in February 2009, the Ragon Institute was officially established at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University to help bring fresh perspectives and encourage cross-disciplinary collaborations to contribute to the discovery of an HIV/AIDS vaccine.
As part of this partnership, the Ragon Institute and IAVI will work together to identify promising concepts generated by the Institute that can be further developed and ultimately advanced to clinical trials with technical support from IAVI. In addition, this partnership is intended to facilitate productive exchanges among leading researchers affiliated with both IAVI and its network of scientific consortia and the Ragon Institute.
“We are honored to be working with the Ragon Institute and hope that this collaborative approach will take us a step further in devising new vaccine strategies and candidates to defeat HIV,” said Seth Berkley, MD, President and CEO of IAVI. “AIDS knows no boundaries, and neither should the scientists working to develop a vaccine to bring an end to one of the world’s leading killers.”