Duke HIV scientist searches for funding after Trump ends landmark vaccine center
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- NIH launched CHAVD in 2005 with $300M to develop HIV vaccine under Duke leadership.
- HHS will terminate CHAVD funding by July 2026 amid broader HIV program cuts.
- Lead scientist Barton Haynes seeks private support to continue vaccine development.
It was compared to the Manhattan Project, but rather than build an atomic bomb, the U.S. government concentrated money and scientific talent to pursue a vaccine that had eluded researchers for more than 20 years.
In 2005, the National Institutes of Health awarded $300 million to launch the Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Immunology and tapped Dr. Barton Haynes, an early AIDS researcher who headed the Duke Human Vaccine Institute in Durham, as director.
“He’s the perfect person to pull this off,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, who later led the country’s COVID-19 pandemic response, said at the time.
Speaking two decades later, Haynes, 77, says the university consortia housed at Duke and the Scripps Research Institute have made steady progress over three consecutive seven-year grant periods toward “the hardest vaccine that vaccinology has ever tried to make.”
The first seven years, he said, were spent mapping out how the unique virus evolved — and how human antibodies evolve in response. Over the next seven years, researchers worked to mimic these responses by learning to guide certain cells to become neutralizing antibodies. The center’s third and current grant, which began in 2019, has involved manufacturing vaccine candidates in a laboratory.
Entering the final year of a $258 million grant, Haynes said the program — now named the Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Development, or CHAVD — approaches a prototype vaccine it can pilot in human subjects.
“The hope was that in the fourth iteration, we would be able to finish the job,” he said during a phone interview on June 27, roughly a month after the Department of Health and Human Services notified him on a video call that it would terminate the CHAVD program.
Haynes pursues replacement HIV vaccine funds
Ending CHAVD was part of broader Trump administration cuts to HIV vaccine research this spring. In a June 3 statement, an HHS spokesperson said the agency had been supporting “duplicative health programs,” including 27 programs addressing HIV and AIDS.
“We must end this wasteful and inefficient model of health programming in favor of strategic, coordinated approaches,” the federal health agency wrote.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has also been a vocal opponent of mRNA technologies, which teach bodies to ward off infectious diseases by making a tiny part of a virus so immune systems can learn how to destroy it. Haynes said mRNA technology has helped the HIV vaccine process iterate more quickly, though he said it isn’t yet known whether the technology would appear in the final vaccine.
HIV infection rates are declining worldwide, though the World Health Organization still recorded 1.3 million new cases in 2023.
In an email to The News & Observer, Duke Health credited CHAVD with making “significant discoveries about HIV,” including breakthroughs regarding how the AIDS virus infects humans.
For most of June, Haynes said he was unsure if CHAVD would receive its final funding payment, which it ultimately did days before the program’s last grant year began in July. The difference between losing government support on July 1, 2025 versus July 1, 2026 is enormous, he said, as the latter gives him time to find replacement money from private donors, foundations and “anyone with a history of supporting these types of initiatives.”
“We’re starting to look for new sources of funding,” he said. “I can’t elaborate on that much more, because we’re just starting that effort. This just happened this week.”
This story was originally published July 10, 2025 at 7:00 AM.
