IAVI works around the world to apply the best scientific ideas and technologies to the design and swift development of candidate AIDS vaccines. Its hybrid operational model integrates key elements of both public and private sector business practices to hasten progress toward that goal.

Five core principles guide IAVI’s operations:

• Speed: Because IAVI seeks not just to develop an AIDS vaccine but to do so as quickly as possible, it places a premium on organizational efficiency in every aspect of its work 

• Flexibility: IAVI strives to remain nimble, so that it can move quickly to exploit new ideas and opportunities 

• Innovation: IAVI systematically explores avenues of research that have traditionally been neglected in AIDS vaccine research and development  

• Partnership: IAVI works in close partnership with governments, scientists, and communities in low- and middle-income countries to sustain support for the global effort to develop an AIDS vaccine, to devise policies supportive of that enterprise and to prepare people for participation in vaccine-related research 

• Access: IAVI has done much preparatory investigation of the mechanisms and policies most likely to ensure the swift distribution and widespread uptake of a future AIDS vaccine

Whether they spend their days behind a lab bench or a spreadsheet, the people of IAVI, working on four continents, strive to keep these principles front and center in their efforts. The five organizational functions that make up IAVI include:

• Finance & Administration, which handles not only money matters but general administration and information technology as well 

• Research & Development, which works with IAVI’s many partners to conduct the research required to design candidate AIDS vaccines and test them in clinical trials around the world

• Policy, which conducts research into public policies and commercial mechanisms that may expedite the fulfillment of IAVI’s central mission

• Country and Regional Programs, which works with IAVI’s partners around the world to advocate for the development of AIDS vaccines and to help prepare the ground for that effort

• Resource Development, which raises the funds that make all this work possible

• Human Resources, which finds the right people to do that work
  
• Communications, which spreads the word about that work, the need for AIDS vaccines and the global effort to develop them

• The Executive Office, which oversees all of the above departments