Word: nih
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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Without an answer, developing vaccines is a very halting process. "The virus is a moving target," says Dr. Gary Nabel, director of the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). "It is constantly changing its genetic makeup through mutations. It's also a moving target because the proteins of the virus surface are actually moving themselves - they are conformationally flexible. The net result is that the immune system never gets a really good look at them...
...Testing for one candidate, made by Merck, began in 2004 with much fanfare and ended three years later with disappointing results: not only had the vaccine not offered protection against HIV infection, but it actually seemed to increase the risk for some people. Because of the Merck results, the NIH, which had a similar vaccine in the works, put off plans for its own study...
Exploring Epigenetic Potential How can we harness the power of epigenetics for good? In 2008 the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced it would pour $190 million into a multilab, nationwide initiative to understand "how and when epigenetic processes control genes." Dr. Elias Zerhouni, who directed the NIH when it awarded the grant, said at the time - in a phrase slightly too dry for its import - that epigenetics had become "a central issue in biology." (See TIME's health and medicine covers...
This past October, the NIH grant started to pay off. Scientists working jointly at a fledgling, largely Internet-based effort called the San Diego Epigenome Center announced with colleagues from the Salk Institute - the massive La Jolla, Calif., think tank founded by the man who discovered the polio vaccine - that they had produced "the first detailed map of the human epigenome...
...least 210 cell types in the human body - and possibly far more, according to Ecker, the Salk biologist, who worked on the epigenome maps. Each of the 210 cell types is likely to have a different epigenome. That's why Ecker calls the $190 million grant from NIH "peanuts" compared with the probable end cost of figuring out what all the epigenetic marks are and how they work in concert...