The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is training its sights on the global AIDS epidemic with an ambitious new initiative to fund vaccine research. The cooperative program will involve 165 of the world's best professionals in the field.

The foundation intends to establish a global team of scientists to work collaboratively toward development a vaccine, it announced on Wednesday.

The funds will be distributed in the form of 16 grants to approximately 165 researchers. All recipients must agree to share their findings with one another. The philosophy behind the awards is that collaboration will speed the process more effectively than competition.

Individuals will be allowed to patent breakthroughs, but each of the investigators involved in the grant programs has signed a contract pledging that any vaccines achieved through their collaborative efforts will be sold cheaply in Africa and and elsewhere in the world where the HIV-AIDS epidemic is most intense.

Collaborative Approach

Eleven grants will support research efforts. One project, for example, aims to find antibodies that might neutralize the HIV virus, while another will explore ways to manipulate cells to make them immune to HIV.

The other five grants will go toward developing an efficient means for processing and integrating information. Teams of researchers will report to five central laboratories that will analyze their findings, "enabling investigators to openly share data and compare results, and allowing the most promising vaccine approaches to be quickly prioritized for further development," according to the Foundation.

More than 25 million people have died from AIDS. About 40 million people worldwide are living with HIV, the virus that causes it, according to the World Health Organization. About 38 million of that number are in poor or developing nations. Although AIDS may finally be slowing down on the global level, according to UNAIDS, new infections are sure to create havoc in particular regions of the world.

Vaccine Crucial

Funding and access to treatment have improved, UNAIDS says, and HIV infection among young people has decreased in some countries in the past five years. However, those positive signs come with the realization that the virus is capable of mutating and remains a very serious threat.

What is needed is a vaccine that could stimulate an individual's immune system to ward off infection -- and, so far, that has been elusive.

The HIV virus not only attacks the body's immune system, but also mutates so rapidly that a person can carry the infection in many different forms. The usual method of injecting fragments of a virus to get the body to fight it by creating antibodies does not work well, given that behavior.

HIV researchers recently have focused on stimulating killer T cells -- the body's own mechanism for attacking and destroying infected cells.

A combination of both techniques may be what's needed to create an effective vaccine, experts say. The Gates Foundation grants support efforts in both areas, and the key to its latest approach is the collaborative nature of the work.

Speeding Progress

"Despite the committed efforts of many researchers around the world, progress has simply not been fast enough," said Dr. Nicholas Hellmann, interim director of HIV programs for the Seattle-based foundation.

The organization's new funding program is the largest-ever investment in HIV and AIDS research, he added.

Gates announced in June that he plans to give up his daily role as chief software architect at Microsoft to spend more time on Foundation projects. It then had approximately $30 billion in assets. Shortly thereafter, multibillionaire Warren Buffett revealed that he would donate $31 billion over the next few years to the Gates Foundation's work. The two men have long been friends.