Weill Cornell Medicine has received a USD 3.8 million NIAID P01 program project grant to advance germline-targeting HIV-1 vaccine immunogen research, with the five-year award running through April 2031.
The grant, awarded under NIH funding opportunity PAR-24-037, supports a multi-institution collaboration led by John P. Moore at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, with co-principal investigator Ian A. Wilson at The Scripps Research Institute and a third performance site at the Academic University Medical Centers in Amsterdam. The P01 mechanism funds two research projects alongside production and administrative cores, reflecting the coordinated infrastructure required for this class of structural vaccinology work.
The scientific focus is the continued development of SOSIP trimers — stabilized, soluble, proteolytically cleaved mimics of the native HIV-1 envelope spike — as germline-targeting immunogens. The central challenge in HIV vaccine development is that broadly neutralizing antibodies, or bNAbs, capable of neutralizing diverse HIV-1 strains are rarely elicited by conventional immunization. SOSIP trimers are designed to engage the precise B-cell precursors from which bNAb lineages can mature, an approach that requires both structural fidelity to the native Env spike and careful immunogen engineering to activate the correct germline-encoded antibody precursors.
Project 1, co-led by Rogier W. Sanders and PJ Klasse with Marit van Gils, focuses on the design of germline-targeting trimers. Project 2, co-led by Wilson and Andrew B. Ward, applies high-resolution cryo-electron microscopy and X-ray crystallography to guide and refine trimer design. Core B, under Moore, supports production of SOSIP trimers at the scale and quality required for preclinical studies and eventual clinical-grade manufacturing. The team states that SOSIP trimers can be produced in quantities compatible with human clinical trial requirements, positioning this program as upstream translational infrastructure rather than basic discovery alone.