Cambridge Businessman gives $100M for AIDS vaccine research
LGR has learned from a source at Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston, MA, that a Cambridge businessman has donated $100 million to fund research into the development of an AIDS vaccine.
The donor, Phillip T. Ragon, is the chief executive of a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Software Company called InterSystems Corp and the gift will establish the Phillip T. and Susan M. Ragon Institute, that will be based at Mass General.
Dr. Bruce Walker, an MGH researcher, will head the new institute and the funds, which will flow through MGH, will be shared with Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University. Dr. Walker is also a physician, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and the director of the Partners AIDS Research Center, which will now also become part of the Ragon Institute.
Dr. Walker said…
Recent scientific advances have brought us closer to the elusive goal of an AIDS vaccine, but reaching that goal will require broad collaboration to adapt breakthroughs in the physical and engineering to our understanding of interactions between viruses and the immune system.”
The institute will bring scientists and clinicians together to better understand how the body fights infections and ultimately to apply that understanding to a broad range of infectious diseases and cancers.
The initial work of the institute will focus on identifying the effective immune responses in a small group of people infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, who are able to keep their virus in check without medications. It will work to design strategies to reproduce those responses. The institute will also collaborate with the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, a not-for-profit group working to research and develop an AIDS vaccine.
Mr. Ragon said in a press statement…
By providing flexible funding and by connecting science and engineering at MIT and Harvard with the research and clinical resources of MGH, we intend to empower many of the world’s best researchers to focus on what they view as the most promising research.”
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awesome on him
That’s pretty damn awesome!. Thank you!
AIDS VACCINE OPPOSED BY THE AIDS HEALTHCARE FOUNDATION
From a bloomberg article from 2008. http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=axb42ai9OAlw&refer=news
“The AIDS Healthcare Foundation, the Los Angeles-based provider of care and support for about 65,000 patients in 20 countries, called for a moratorium on HIV vaccine research.
“It’s unfortunate that it took an AIDS vaccine trial that made more people become infected to make people pay attention and stop this runaway train,” said Michael Weinstein, the group’s president, in a telephone interview today. “There’s no validity in the underlying idea that there will be an AIDS vaccine.”
Before spending more money and time on a human test of the government’s vaccine, researchers should go back to trying to understand the AIDS virus, said Ronald Desrosiers, a Harvard University scientist.
“I am against seeing it go forward,” he said in an e- mail. “I am willing to listen to arguments to the contrary, but have not heard any yet to make me feel otherwise.”
That is awesome. Especially in the light of how many super-rich spenq the last 8 years stealling a trillion $$ while enriching themselves, licensed by the lasaise faire attitude of the Bush Admin.
I guess there still are some people who believe in doing the right thing. Even though that mostly doesn’t exist in the so called moral values people who took over the republican party.