Bruce Walker, HMS professor of medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, will be one of four initial principal investigators at a new tuberculosis and HIV research center being established by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) in South Africa.
HHMI is undertaking the initiative in partnership with the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), establishing the KwaZulu-Natal Research Institute for Tuberculosis and HIV (K-RITH). K-RITH will create an international center for research and training with the goal of making major scientific contributions to the worldwide efforts against the TB and HIV epidemics.
K-RITH builds on work already begun by Walker and several other Harvard researchers and the Harvard Initiative for Global Health (HIGH). In 2002, a grant to Walker from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation led to the construction of the Doris Duke Medical Research Institute (DDMRI) at UKZN, which formally opened in 2003 to promote AIDS research at the heart of the global HIV epidemic.
The DDMRI serves as the nucleus for the new expanded effort to focus not just on HIV but also on TB. Last summer, Branch Moody, HMS associate professor of medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital; Sarah Fortune, HSPH assistant professor of immunology and infectious diseases; and Eric Rubin, HMS assistant professor of medicine (microbiology and molecular genetics) and HSPH associate professor of immunology and infectious diseases, received funding from HHMI and HIGH for work on TB and HIV in South Africa.
The new institute will be located in a facility to be built on the campus of the Nelson R. Mandela School of Medicine. It will be connected to existing facilities of programs in the DDMRI in which Walker and other HMS researchers play key roles, the HIV Pathogenesis Programme and the Center for the AIDS Program of Research in South Africa. The new building will include two floors of biosafety level 3 labs. HHMI has pledged a total of $60 million for construction and research over the next 10 years.
Walker was also recently named director of the Phillip T. and Susan M. Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard. The institute was founded in February with a gift of $100 million from the Ragons, to support innovative, unconventional research; accelerate the discovery of an HIV/AIDS vaccine; and foster worldwide collaboration among scientists with different but complementary backgrounds.
Walker studies the immune response to viral pathogens, particularly HIV. He is leading an international research effort to understand how some people who are infected with HIV but have never been treated can control the virus through their immune system. He hopes such knowledge can lead to a vaccine and new treatments for the disease.
