In a technical tour de force, structural biologists funded by the National Institutes of Health have determined the three-dimensional structure of a molecule involved in HIV infection and in many forms of cancer. The high-resolution structure sheds light on how the molecule functions and could point to ways to control its activity, potentially locking out HIV and stalling cancer's spread.

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, today announced three new contracts to fund research on vaccines to protect against emerging infectious diseases and biological threats that could be used in a terror attack. Each project focuses on simple and efficient vaccine delivery approaches that could be deployed quickly. The total funding for the three contracts could reach $68 million, depending on the successful completion of defined project milestones.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is partnering with the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) with a plan to invest $130 million over five years to transform African medical education and dramatically increase the number of health care workers.

The National Institutes of Health today announced awards to support an initiative to understand how genetic variation may control gene activity and its relationship to disease. Launched as a pilot phase, the Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) project will create a resource researchers can use to study inherited susceptibility to illness and will establish a tissue bank for future biological studies.

The 2010 Nobel Prize in chemistry has been awarded to National Institutes of Health (NIH) grantee Ei-ichi Negishi, Ph.D., of Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana. Dr. Negishi shares the award with Richard F. Heck, Ph.D., of the University of Delaware in Newark, Delaware and Akira Suzuki, Ph.D., of Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan. The three researchers are honored for developing complementary methods to find more efficient ways of linking carbon atoms together to build complex molecules.

The National Institutes of Health intends to invest approximately $60 million over the next five years in the NIH Director's Early Independence Award (EIA) program to help junior investigators leapfrog over traditional post-doctoral training and move into independent academic positions at U.S. institutions, directly upon completion of their graduate research degrees.

The National Institutes of Health plans to add about 1,750 participants over the age of 75 to its upcoming Systolic Blood Pressure Intervention Trial (SPRINT) to determine whether a lower blood pressure range in older adults will reduce cardiovascular and kidney diseases, age-related cognitive decline, and dementia.

A new study estimates that 2.5 percent of the United States population, or about 7.6 million Americans, have food allergies. Food allergy rates were found to be higher for children, non-Hispanic blacks, and males, according to the researchers. The odds of male black children having food allergies were 4.4 times higher than others in the general population.

Researchers at the National Institutes of Health have found that variations in a gene for an enzyme involved in cell energy metabolism appear to increase the risk for prostate cancer.

New findings by National Institutes of Health scientists could explain how salmonella bacteria, a common cause of food poisoning, efficiently spread in people. In a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers describe finding a reservoir of rapidly replicating salmonella inside epithelial cells. These bacteria are primed to infect other cells and are pushed from the epithelial layer by a new mechanism that frees the salmonella to infect other cells or be shed into the intestine.

An intensive lifestyle intervention program designed to achieve and maintain weight loss improves diabetes control and cardiovascular disease risk factors in overweight and obese individuals with type 2 diabetes, according to four-year results of the Look AHEAD study, funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The results are published in the Sept. 27, 2010, issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine.

The National Institutes of Health today announces the launch of a new resource, called the Database of Genomic Structural Variation, or dbVar, to help scientists understand how differences in DNA contribute to human health and disease.

The National Institutes of Health has awarded 23 grants for structural biology research totaling up to $290 million over five years. The projects will focus on determining the shapes and functions of proteins important in biology and medicine.

Administering a new form of immunotherapy to children with neuroblastoma, a nervous system cancer, increased the percentage of those who were alive and free of disease progression after two years. The randomized phase III clinical trial was coordinated by the Children’s Oncology Group (COG), a national consortium of researchers supported by the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the NIH.