The world desperately needs effective AIDS vaccines, and the Emory Vaccine Center is at the forefront of AIDS vaccine development. Our scientists are making extraordinary advances in understanding the immune system and creating vaccines to prevent and treat HIV infection.

We urgently need your help. Grant funding fails to cover many essential expenses, and we rely on individual donations to accelerate discovery and attract larger grants. Our ability to develop effective vaccines for HIV/AIDS depends on our level of resources.

The Emory Vaccine Center is doing amazing things with every dollar available. On average, each private-funding dollar an Emory Vaccine Center scientist receives is leveraged into 17 additional research dollars in the form of prestigious federal grants. Where else can you get this kind of return on investment and support research that will save lives for years to come?

Where else can you get this kind of return on investment and support research that will save lives for years to come? We are CLOSER THAN YOU KNOW to developing vaccines against AIDS. Please become a Champion for Hope and Make a Gift to the Emory Vaccine Center.

Examples of private support making a critical difference at the Emory Vaccine Center:

Accelerating discovery:

• Private funding was critical when Dr. Harriet Robinson was moving her protective HIV/AIDS vaccine into human clinical trials and enabled her to speed up the costly process of translating the research from animal studies to human testing. Emory was the first university in the U.S. to have an AIDS vaccine in human clinical trials.

• An entire research team developing a promising new preventive AIDS vaccine had to stop work a year ago because they needed a stem cell line "certified" (approved) by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). No grant money was available to cover this over $50k cost, but private funding was there to help. The cell line got approved and now that vaccine development is heading quickly toward human clinical trials.
  

Leveraging private funding to get large federal grants:

• The amazing HIV/AIDS treatment vaccine that Dr. Rama Amara is developing started off as nothing but a bright idea in his head. Large grants can only be applied for once an idea has been proven. Private funding of about $100,000 allowed him to show that his idea had huge promise. He's now been awarded a $1.5 million federal grant to pursue this lifesaving vaccine for the HIV-infected.

Costly scientific equipment and facilities essential to vaccine development:

• Grant funding does not cover the cost of highly specialized equipment that is essential to create vaccines. For example, a powerful cell sorting computer nicknamed the "Mo-Flo" costs $500,000 and one advanced microscope can easily cost more than $20,000.

• Dr. Mark Mulligan of the Hope Clinic needs to create a sample repository- a "library" of blood samples from HIV-infected patients- to better study the virus and how to test HIV/AIDS vaccines. Emory has the largest number of HIV-infected patients in the Southeast, so we are perfectly positioned to create this type of repository. All we need is the private funding, since federal grants are not available for this.

Training the next generation of scientists:

• Private funding is needed to create fellowships to support post doctoral researchers who will be the next generation of HIV/AIDS scientists

Recruiting leading scientists from around the world:

• Brilliant minds from around the world are always needed to continue working on HIV/AIDS vaccines and expand our program. Private funding is important to recruit them from top universities with enormous amounts of endowed professorships and other non-grant faculty support. Once they come to Emory, funds are needed to retain them in this highly-competitive scientific field.