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Obama Nominates Human Genome Veteran To Lead NIH

Dr. Francis S. Collins, the Yale-educated, guitar-strumming physician and geneticist who led the Human Genome Project, was nominated Wednesday to head the National Institutes of Health, the New York Times reports. "Dr. Collins"s selection, which had been rumored for weeks, was praised by top scientists and research advocacy organizations for whom the health institute is a crucial patron," the Times reports. He is expected to sail through Senate confirmation.
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Gene Transfer Technology May Lead To HIV Vaccine

A research team may have broken the impasse that has frustrated HIV vaccine researchers by using an unconventional approach that bypasses the usual vaccine development path. Using gene transfer technology to produces molecules that block infection, the scientists protected monkeys from infection by a virus closely related to HIV -- the simian immunodeficiency virus, or SIV. "We used a leapfrog strategy, bypassing the natural immune system response that was the target of previous HIV and SIV vaccine candidates," explains study leader Philip R. Johnson, MD, chief scientific officer at The Children"s Hospital of Philadelphia and professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania. Johnson and colleagues reported their work in Nature Medicine Most attempts at developing an HIV vaccine have used substances aimed at stimulating the body"s immune system to produce antibodies that would eliminate the virus before or after it infected cells. In clinical trials, however, these vaccines have not elicited protective immune responses, just as the body fails on its own to produce an effective response during natural HIV infection.