The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) established the Infectious Diseases Clinical Research Consortium.
This leadership consortium will encompass NIAID’s Vaccine and Treatment Evaluation Units (VTEUs). NIAID, which is part of the National Institute of Health (NIH), will fund $29 million per year for seven years for the program.
“For nearly 60 years, NIAID-supported VTEUs have played vital roles in developing new and improved vaccines and treatments for numerous infectious diseases, including influenza, pneumococcal disease, and smallpox,” NIAID Director Anthony Fauci said. “This flagship program aligns with NIAID’s dual mission of conducting robust, wide-ranging biomedical research on existing infectious diseases while maintaining readiness to respond to emergent disease threats with the quick design and launch of clinical trials. We anticipate that the addition of a centralized leadership group will further enhance the effectiveness of this time-tested program.”
The consortium will be led by co-principal investigators David Stephens of Emory University, and Kathleen Neuzil of the University of Maryland School of Medicine. The group will include VTEU investigators as well as scientific experts in infectious diseases. They will prioritize candidate vaccines, diagnostics, therapeutics, and other interventions to test in clinical trials. Further, the leadership group will have the capacity to organize and initiate clinical trials at the VTEU sites.
The nine VTEUs are located at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston; Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center; Emory University in Atlanta; Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute in Seattle; Saint Louis University; University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore; University of Rochester; the University of Washington in Seattle; and Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville.
The VTEUs will have the capacity to conduct human challenge trials—where healthy volunteers are exposed to infection under tightly controlled conditions—of influenza, malaria and other diseases.
“We are excited to announce this new chapter in NIAID’s clinical trials research enterprise,” said Emily Erbelding, director of NIAID’s Division of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases. “We fully expect that the Infectious Diseases Clinical Research Consortium, DMID’s largest clinical trials network, will continue to accelerate our progress in clinical research of vaccine candidates and other interventions for decades to come.”