U.S. businessman pledges $100M US to develop AIDS vaccine

A businessman in Massachusetts has donated $100 million US to fund research into a vaccine against AIDS, a hospital announced Wednesday.

Phillip Ragon's gift will help create an institute to be based at Massachusetts General Hospital that will focus on finding an effective vaccine for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

Ragon is the founder and owner of InterSystems Corp., a Cambridge, Mass.-based company that provides database software to hospitals and other industries.

"Recent scientific advances have brought us closer to the elusive goal of an AIDS vaccine," said Bruce Walker, a physician-investigator at Massachusetts General and a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School who will be the institute's director.

Reaching the goal of an AIDS vaccine will require collaboration between clinicians and scientists to better understand how the body fights infections. The knowledge can then be applied to understanding many infectious diseases and cancers.

The pledge will give the hospital $10 million US in each of the next 10 years, which MGH said is the largest donation in its history.

The research will initially focus on a small group of people infected with HIV who do not need to take medications to keep their viral levels down. The goal of a vaccine is to reproduce that immune response.

Researchers will collaborate with the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, a not-for-profit group working to research and develop potential vaccines.