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RESOURCES AIDS Division Awarded Research Center Grant The National Institutes of Health has announced that it will fund a new HMS Center for AIDS Research (CFAR) with a total of $15 million over five years. The award reflects an integration of two existing HMS-based centers, the Partners/Fenway/Shattuck CFAR and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute/ Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center/Children's Hospital CFAR. The grant, which doubles the CFAR funding cap of $1.5 million per year, is a result of the efforts of Bruce Walker, head of the HMS Division of AIDS and HMS professor of medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, and Joseph Sodroski, HMS professor of pathology at DFCI. As principal investigators of the two previous CFAR awards, they petitioned the NIH to raise the cap and make the integration fiscally viable. "We are really quite excited about this award and we see the Center for AIDS Research as a forum where people can come together under a common umbrella to get things done and to try to realize the most synergy possible from the various outstanding components that are already here at Harvard," Walker said. "This is a case where the new whole will be even better than the sum of already excellent parts," added Sodroski. The NIH CFAR program provides administrative and research support to enhance and coordinate leading AIDS research projects. Twenty centers operate around the country, but Harvard's is the first new center to qualify for increased funding. The Harvard CFAR will revolve around five scientific programs: international, therapeutics, vaccine development, pathogenesis, and epidemiology. The grant also allows support for feasibility studies, up to $50,000 per year for up to 10 projects. "This will provide the infrastructure and funding to explore high-risk, high-impact research avenues," Sodroski said. "The other way it is invaluable is that it will help us to retain outstanding junior faculty and recruit new faculty," said Walker, since the funds can also be used as part of a recruitment startup package. "This represents an ability for us to grow this program in new and terrific ways." The announcement of the new grant comes hot on the heels of the new Harvard University Program on AIDS (HUPA), which will coordinate AIDS related programs throughout the University, under the umbrella of the Harvard Initiative on Global Health (HIGH). "We see the CFAR as a founding program within HUPA that has the potential to bring schools and faculty together around AIDS-related research, whether that's in social sciences, the political arena, legal areas, any issue that supports the University's efforts to help end the AIDS pandemic," said Tom LaSalvia, executive director of the HMS Division of AIDS. CFAR projects are already having an impact in some regions of the world that are hardest hit and least able to cope with AIDS, including the KwaZulu Natal province in South Africa, the Eastern Caribbean, and Vietnam. This work will continue under the new grant. "Bringing together the efforts of the two CFARs within the Harvard Medical community while embracing complementary efforts across Harvard creates powerful synergies to hasten our efforts to quell the global AIDS crisis," said Joseph Martin, dean of the Faculty of Medicine. "This is a noteworthy example of the power of combining resources and research endeavors to unite disparate faculty around HMS research priorities."