IAVI has consistently dedicated roughly three-quarters of its resources to AIDS vaccine research and development. We will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. But we will remain flexible about how we invest those resources, so as to better meet the changing needs of the global AIDS vaccine effort.

IAVI’s scientific team—drawn from both the vaccine industry and leading academic labs—works in partnership with more than 40 nongovernmental research organizations and academic, biotechnology, pharmaceutical and government institutions to design and develop AIDS vaccine candidates, run clinical trials and conduct clinical research on HIV epidemiology and disease. To maximize efficiency and minimize waste, we employ industrial project-management systems to direct a portfolio of R&D projects, prioritizing the most promising products and moving them swiftly through the vaccine development pipeline.

Our efforts historically have focused on the clinical assessment of candidate vaccines developed by other organizations, and we have, in collaboration with a number of institutions in sub-Saharan Africa, India, the UK, Europe and the US, evaluated candidate AIDS vaccines in clinical trials. In support of that effort, we have shored up the technical and scientific capacity of a number of our partners in developing countries—most notably by building and supporting a network of comprehensive clinical research centers in sub-Saharan Africa.

These research centers are equipped and staffed to conduct vaccine trials at the highest of standards, and have completed several early-stage clinical evaluations of candidate AIDS vaccines. They are also engaged in HIV-related research that is vital both to laying the groundwork for large-scale efficacy trials (or Phase III trials) and to informing the design of AIDS vaccine candidates.

Recently, as it became apparent that previous approaches to AIDS vaccine development were not adequate, IAVI increased its investment in the design of next-generation vaccine candidates.

• We established in 2008 the AIDS Vaccine Design and Development Laboratory in New York City, focused on designing next generation vaccine candidates and conducting the requisite translational research to accelerate them to clinical trials 
   
• Together with The Scripps Research Institute in California, we developed the IAVI Neutralizing Antibody Center. It will be the hub of IAVI's global efforts to design immunogens capable of eliciting broadly neutralizing  to HIV 

 
These laboratories coordinate and provide the scientific leadership for three consortia established by IAVI to tackle the main problems of HIV vaccine design:

• The Neutralizing Antibody Consortium, a collaborative, international effort launched in 2002 to solve the problem of how to design AIDS vaccine candidates that elicit antibodies that effectively neutralize HIV
• The Vectors Consortium is a similar effort to discover new and potentially more effective ways to deliver the active ingredients of AIDS vaccine candidates
• The Live Attenuated Consortium seeks to uncover vital clues to thwarting HIV infection in humans by studying the immunology of non-human primates that have been successfully immunized against the simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), a cousin to HIV