6 June, 2000--As efforts to develop an AIDS vaccine intensify worldwide, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the University of California, San Francisco, today announced plans to provide researchers with a premier, centralized online source of information on all aspects of AIDS prevention.
The new AAAS venture, supported by an $850,000 grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), will be launched in collaboration with the UCSF's popular web site, HIVInSite, which serves medical practitioners, policymakers, patients and the lay public. These "sister sites" will be linked together to better serve consumers and scientists, says Ellis Rubinstein, editor of Science, the leading weekly research journal published by the AAAS.
Now averaging roughly four million visitors from 150 different countries each month, HIV InSite is a joint effort of the UCSF AIDS Research Institute's Center for AIDS Prevention Studies and the UCSF Positive Health Program at San Francisco General Hospital, which cares for about one-third of the city's HIV-infected patients.
Expanding on a small but popular web site, http://www.Sciencemag.org/NAIDS, which is devoted to the neurological impacts of AIDS, the new site will provide a global online forum where scientists can gather and exchange the latest information on HIV prevention. The site will publish peer-reviewed papers and review articles, as well as daily features and information resources for scientists.
This kind of information exchange is vital to preventing HIV/AIDS, emphasizes Paul Volberding, M.D., UCSF professor of medicine and director of the UCSF Positive Health Program. "Working with the global epidemic of HIV from our base so close to the Silicon Valley, we can't help believing that this type of information distributed worldwide will have a major impact on vaccine development. We are excited at the novel partnership this project represents and hope it serves as the beginning of a new era of Internet-facilitated collaboration," he says.
Thomas J. Coates, Ph.D., director of the UCSF ARI, adds, "As vaccine research continues, the ultimate conquest of HIV may depend on a multi-focused strategy, emphasizing prevention as well as the ongoing search for a cure. We're delighted to be teaming up with the AAAS on this new web site, which will strengthen our ongoing efforts to present authoritative information on all aspects of HIV/AIDS."
Contributing to a reduction in the incidence of AIDS worldwide will be the goal of the new web site, Rubinstein says: Every day worldwide, some 16,000 people are infected with HIV, and 30 million had been infected by the beginning of 1998. "Once it goes live," he says, "the web site will provide scientists on the front lines with the most current and rigorous data available on HIV prevention strategies."
The AIDS prevention web site is the latest online information service from the AAAS, the world's largest scientific professional organization. Previous successful online ventures of the AAAS have included Science OnLine http://www.Scienceonline.org; Science's NextWave http://nextwave.Sciencemag.org, serving younger researchers; Science's STKE http://www.stke.org, an experimental "signal transduction knowledge environment" for researchers involved in cell signaling; and EurekAlert! http://www.eurekalert.org, which brings research news to some 1,600 journalists worldwide.
According to Richard Peters, M.D., Ph.D., principal investigator on the project, "The new web site will expand on a successful web prototype--the NeuroAIDS web site--that is already allowing researchers to see peer-reviewed content instantly and to benefit from a series of search and productivity web tools designed by Mednav.com. For this new venture, Mednav.com will continue working with the AAAS to bring cutting-edge Internet technologies to the biomedical community." (See http://www.mednav.com.)
Ellen Stover, director of AIDS research at the NIMH, applauded the new AAAS web site. "Using the web to share information is of vital importance for addressing the challenges faced by AIDS researchers," she notes. "This new service should help promote prevention by speeding the information-exchange process."
Additional collaborators and sponsors are being sought for the AAAS venture, conceptualized with support from Virginia-based telecommunications expert John Evans. A variety of funding structures, including subscriptions, are being evaluated, Rubinstein says.
For information about HIV InSite or the UCSF AIDS Research Institute, contact Corinna Kaarlela in the UCSF News Office at 415-476-3804.
To arrange interviews with Science's Ellis Rubinstein or Richard Peters of the AAAS, contact Ginger Pinholster, 202-326-6440.