Hughes Institute Gives $60 Million For South Africa Aids Study
The center, at the Nelson R. Mandela School of Medicine in Durban, will focus on AIDS and tuberculosis, Thomas Cech, president of the Hughes institute, said today in a statement disclosing the grant.
The medical school, part of the University of KwaZulu-Natal, is situated in KwaZulu-Natal, the impoverished region of South Africa hardest hit by the AIDS epidemic. There hundreds have also died from extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis, a form of the disease that can overcome almost all medicine. The laboratory will be called the KwaZulu-Natal Research Institute for Tuberculosis and HIV, or K-RITH, and will perform work on both infections, the Hughes institute said.
“The dual epidemic of HIV and tuberculosis has emerged as one of the most significant challenges confronting modern medicine and science around the globe,” the institute said in an e-mailed statement. “New approaches and fresh thinking are urgently required.”
The laboratory is the first that Hughes, a Chevy Chase, Maryland-based nonprofit organization that grants about $780 million annually for science and education, has built outside the U.S., said Jim Keeley, a spokesman. It will support and train African scientists to challenge the AIDS virus, called HIV for human immunodeficiency virus, and TB, said Bruce Walker, one of four scientists who will lead the lab.
Salim Karim, director of the Center for the AIDS Program of Research in South Africa, and William Jacobs Jr., a Hughes-funded scientist at the Yeshiva Universitys Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, will also help start the center, along with the dean of the Mandela medical school, Willem Sturm, who will be interim director.
The human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, attacks the bodys T-cells, the immune defenders that normally help keep viruses and bacteria at bay. In KwaZulu-Natal, almost half of pregnant women are infected with the virus in some areas. About two million people die of the disease annually, most of them in poor countries.
“This is the ideal place to put people to carry out this research,” said Walker, an AIDS expert at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, in an interview. “Were bringing more resources to build up HIV science in Africa.”
About 33 million people are infected globally with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, and 2.7 million more catch it annually. While drug treatment can keep patients healthy, officials say that only a vaccine or some other reliable preventive can keep the disease from continuing to spread.