At a time when the dangers of HIV and tuberculosis (TB) co-infection are increasingly apparent, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) has teamed up with the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, to create a new international research facility dedicated entirely to studying these two diseases, as well as how they interact. The KwaZulu-Natal Research Institute for Tuberculosis and HIV will be housed within the grounds of the Nelson Mandela School of Medicine in Durban. "There is no place in the world where there is a dedicated integrated TB-HIV research center, so this is really the first one of those. And what I think is so exciting about this is that it is right in the middle of the worst parts of those epidemics," says Bruce Walker, an HHMI investigator who will lead immunology research within the HIV program at the new KwaZulu-Natal Research Institute. The region is ravaged by one of the world's most devastating TB-HIV co-epidemics, with about half of the local population suffering from HIV/AIDS. It is in the province's rural area of Tugela Ferry, where a severe outbreak of extremely drug-resistant TB was reported in 2006. Construction of the new institute, a six-story building that will contain high-security labs for TB research, is scheduled to begin in September. In addition to providing a platform for testing new vaccines and drugs, it is designed to serve as a global resource to attract top talent and train the next generation of African scientists. "There are vanishingly few opportunities for foreign-trained African researchers to come back and do research in their country," says Walker. HHMI has promised funding worth $60 million over the next ten years to secure the long-term vision of the key HHMI scientists involved.

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) in Chevy Chase, Maryland, last week announced the setting-up of its first research laboratory outside the United States. The KwaZulu-Natal Research Institute for Tuberculosis and HIV in Durban, South Africa, will operate in partnership with the University of KwaZulu-Natal and will focus on the increasing incidence of tuberculosis in those infected with HIV. One in ten individuals worldwide is infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacterium that causes the disease, but it does not usually cause full-blown disease. However, M. tuberculosis can be devastating in individuals whose immune systems are weakened by HIV. South Africa accounts for almost one-fifth of the global HIV disease burden, and tuberculosis, including multi-drug-resistant and extensively drug-resistant strains, is a major problem there. The HHMI will invest US$60 million in the centre over the next decade, and will bring in the cream of its international scientists to help train local researchers.

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the University of KwaZulu-Natal announced plans today to establish a new center for research on the interrelated epidemics of HIV and tuberculosis, two diseases that go hand in hand across sub-Saharan Africa, with devastating consequences, but have hitherto been studied mainly in isolation from one another. The new multimillion-dollar KwaZulu-Natal Research Institute for Tuberculosis and HIV will bring together in Durban, South Africa, key researchers on both diseases, and in the long term aims to build up an advanced doctoral-research program in this emerging field, said Peter Bruns, vice president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a U.S.-based philanthropy.

A groundbreaking partnership between the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) and the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) in South Africa will establish an international research center focused on making major scientific contributions to the worldwide effort to control the devastating co-epidemic of tuberculosis (TB) and HIV and on training a new generation of scientists in Africa. HHMI, a non-profit medical research organization that ranks as one of the nation's largest philanthropies, has committed $60 million to the initiative over the next 10 years. William R. Jacobs, Jr., Ph.D., an HHMI investigator and professor of microbiology & immunology, and of genetics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University, will be one of two leading HHMI investigators actively engaged in KwaZulu-Natal Research Institute for Tuberculosis and HIV (K-RITH). There are approximately 350 HHMI investigators, a group that includes 13 Nobel Prize winners and 124 members of the National Academy of Sciences. South Africa has more residents infected with HIV than any other nation in the world. By 2007, the nation accounted for 17 percent of the global HIV disease burden – an estimated 5.4 million people are infected – and it has one of the highest per capita rates of TB in the world. A major problem in pre-AIDs South Africa, TB emerged as a public health crisis in its own right, particularly with the emergence of both multi-drug resistant (MDR) and extensively drug resistant (XDR) strains of TB in persons already infected with HIV. KwaZulu-Natal province, home to more than 10 million people, bears an even greater burden of disease than the nation as a whole and as much as 40 percent of the population may be positive for HIV. When an outbreak of extensively drug-resistant or XDR-TB was reported in the rural area of Tugela Ferry in 2006, the region became a focus of international concern even as additional cases of XDR-TB surfaced elsewhere in the world.

A vast South African AIDS research initiative is growing even larger with the launch of a $60 million project to attack the deadly link between HIV and tuberculosis. At a news conference yesterday in Washington, scientists from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the University of KwaZulu-Natal, in Durban, South Africa, announced the 10-year initiative, to be centered in a new research facility on the Durban campus of the university's Nelson Mandela Medical School. The new project will bolster an effort with deep Boston roots in the AIDS research laboratories of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Researchers from MGH and the medical school have worked on AIDS/HIV with Durban colleagues for a decade, led by MGH AIDS researcher Bruce D. Walker. He is also an investigator at the Hughes Institute and is closely involved in the new AIDS-TB project. Last month Walker's team received a $100 million gift from Cambridge software entrepreneur Phillip Terrence Ragon to create a new institute to develop an AIDS vaccine. That work relies in part on research being conducted in Durban.

Last week, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute announced the KwaZulu-Natal Research Institute for Tuberculosis and HIV, a $60 million project on the campus of the Nelson R. Mandela School of Medicine at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban.

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