This application requests funds to partially cover the cost of planning, organizing, publicizing, and hosting the 12th Annual Symposium on Nonhuman Primate Models for AIDS. The symposium will be held October 12-15, 1994 at the Marriott Hotel at Copley Place in Boston, MA and will be hosted by the New England Regional Primate Research Center, Harvard Medical School (NERPRC). This meeting has become the premier forum for the presentation and exchange of the most recent scientific advances in AIDS research utilizing animal models. The latest findings in pathogenesis, virus-host interactions, and vaccine and drug development will be presented. It is anticipated that more than 400 scientists will attend this meeting and that because of its east coast location that a significant number will come from abroad. The symposium will encompass five consecutive half-day scientific sessions each devoted to a different theme. These will be: 1) routes of transmission and epidemiology; 2) virus-host interaction and pathogenesis; 3) molecular biology; 4) vaccine development; and, 5) therapeutic strategies/miscellaneous. A program committee consisting of three faculty members from NERPRC and four from other institutions, will review abstracts and select those to be presented from the platform for each of the five scientific sessions. The committee members will include leaders in the field from a variety of scientific disciplines. Criteria for selection will include relevance of the topic to the theme of the meeting and the originality and quality of the information contained in the abstract. Those individuals giving formal presentations will also be asked to submit their presentation in manuscript form for publication in the Journal of Medical Primatology. In addition, there will also be poster sessions for those meritorious presentations that cannot be accommodated in one of the five platform sessions. The program committee will also select those individuals to be invited to speak at the plenary sessions.
