The Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation has received a five-year, $9.7-million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to study ways of preventing HIV/AIDS transmission to children via breast milk.

The endeavor supported by the grant will be the first of its kind to support eight basic and pre-clinical research studies exploring critical questions about breast milk transmission of HIV, pediatric immune responses, identification of appropriate vaccine candidates for pediatric populations, and clinical-trial optimization. It will also support up to three Phase I clinical trials of vaccine candidates – that is, testing in a relatively small group of humans, usually healthy, to learn how the vaccines affect the body and to establish that the vaccines are generally safe.

The program shall fund clinical trials utilizing products that have been safely tested on adults previously. The best products, as advised by an advisory board, will move forward. The trials shall be conducted in selective study sites complying with the highest ethical standards. The volunteers will be offered high standard care and support at that site and participants will be followed for up to two years once entering the study.

Pamela W. Barnes, president and CEO of the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, declared that the funds will be used to develop and test candidate vaccines to prevent HIV infection in infants, noting the absence of children in HIV vaccine research even though nearly 14 percent of all new HIV infections are in children who contract the disease from their mothers and praised the Gates Foundation for making an effort on a global level to develop such a cure.

"We don't want to be celebrating the discovery of an HIV vaccine and then stop and realize it's ineffective or unsafe for children," she said in a foundation statement issued about the grant. "We need research aimed at both children and adults and the Gates Foundation is helping make that possible."

Barnes briefs the presence of only two vaccine trials aimed at blocking transmission of the virus from mother-to-child, either during childbirth or through breast-feeding and those infected by latter are certainly in a better position to benefit from a preventative vaccine dosed shortly after birth and may also be able to gain immunity from the virus for life.

“Vaccinating children has been the key to tackling the world’s deadliest epidemics, and HIV could be the next chapter in that story,” said Barnes. “It is absolutely vital that we start to include children in HIV vaccine research, or we may miss important discoveries that only pediatric research could reveal.”, she added.

Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation has been active in this field since 1988, providing $10 million to support 41 separate studies related to pediatric vaccine research. The new grant aims at expanding EGPAF’s ability to fund critical vaccine research and is nearly equal to all the money the Glaser Foundation spent on HIV/AIDS research between 1988 and 2007.

The EGPAF mainly focuses on rigorous research in the field of pediatric HIV/AIDS in order to slow HIV infection in children, prevent new infections, develop a preventative vaccine and ultimately finding a cure for HIV/AIDS.

The Gates Foundation, created in 2000 in Seattle, Washington by Bill and Melinda Gates, is the largest transparently operated charitable foundation in the world and was doubled in size by Warren Buffet in 2006. It has spent nearly $500 million on initiatives to prevent the spread of HIV and for research into potential HIV/AIDS vaccines. It also has spent millions of dollars to reduce extreme poverty, and, in the United States, to expand educational opportunities and access to information technology.

In 2006, more than 500,000 children contracted HIV — most as a result of mother-to-child transmission of the virus and one in three cases are estimated to occur through breast feeding.

According to researchers, there is a need to study a vaccine in a pediatric population as they work differently in adult and children’s bodies. The recently published malaria vaccine trials conducted by GlaxoSmithkline showed better efficacy of the vaccine in one- to four-year-olds than in adults. Also, other vaccines already in use require fewer doses in children than adults to generate the same level of protection. Examples include Hepatitis B, chickenpox, and HPV vaccines.