Charlotte Raymond Photography Research on an HIV vaccine in the United States: priorities have changedCharlotte Raymond Photography
The National Institutes of Health (NIH), the top medical research organization in the United States, has announced that it would no longer allocate 10% of its scientific budget, or the equivalent of $3 billion in 2015, to studies of AIDS. This marks the end of a strategy that began in the early 1990s to keep the epidemic of the disease at bay. The agency will also redirect its investments, placing less emphasis on basic science and more on searching for a vaccine and new therapies to fight the syndrome. NIH and the US Congress agreed to the 10% set-aside about 25 years ago, at a time when a diagnosis of AIDS was almost a death sentence and most patients survived for less than a year on the average. Pressure from groups heavily affected by the disease in the first phase of the epidemic, and gay militants in particular, was fundamental for maintaining the set-aside. The advent of therapies that significantly lengthen survival times for patients had a negative impact on the strategy because the number of deaths dropped considerably, so that the priority was no longer justified. “The reshuffling is necessary if difficult and painful,” Columbia University virologist Ian Lipkin told the journal Science. According to the NIH Advisory Board, as current projects end, some of the funding will be reallocated to research on other diseases.
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