Major AIDS Institute Inaugurated in San Francisco
On December 1 the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) officially inaugurated the AIDS Research Institute, "the largest AIDS initiative anywhere outside of the National Institutes of Health." This effort brings together all existing AIDS programs at the University, and has a strong focus on multidisciplinary research."The next generation of answers requires a deeper level of collaboration," said Thomas Coates, Ph.D., director of the Institute, and professor of medicine, epidemiology, and statistics at UCSF. "The important answers will come at the interface of the sciences. It's clear we cannot answer clinically important questions without bringing people together."
The AIDS Research Institute will provide "both financial and practical support for a broad range of initiatives, including vaccine research, development of new therapies, studies of transmission dynamics, prevention science, AIDS policy and ethics research, a new clinical virology and immunology lab, and international and community studies. It will also provide the mechanism for meetings of scientific minds through town hall forums, peer review sessions, focus groups and 'targeted action groups,' in which a dozen or so researchers will meet to plan multidisciplinary studies."
The executive committee consists of Haile T. Debas, M.D. (Chancellor and Dean of the School of Medicine at UCSF), Margaret A. Chesney, Ph.D., Thomas J. Coates, Ph.D., Warner C. Greene, M.D., Ph.D., John S. Greenspan, B.Sc., B.D.S., Ph.D., Jay A. Levy, M.D., Paul A. Volberding, M.D., and Diane W. Wara, M.D.
For more information, see the UCSF AIDS Web site, http://hivinsite.ucsf.edu/
