The objective of this project is to provide immunologic laboratory support to the AIDs vaccine effort. AIDS vaccine trials necessitate an extraordinarily comprehensive evaluation of the immunological responses of vaccine recipients. Humoral response assays to be provided by this contract include enzyme linked immunosorbent assays (ELISA) and Western Blot testing, viral neutralization and viral antigen testing, and other humoral and cellular immune response tests. Since the AIDS vaccine trials are run in a multi-centered format to alleviate the potential difficulty in rapidly recruiting a sufficient number of volunteers at only one site to conduct statistically significant vaccine evaluations, rigorous quality control of immunological evaluations is required to permit pooling of results. High quality results from both individual vaccine test sites and the central immunology laboratory must be made rapidly available to the AIDS Vaccine Evaluation Network. A centralized immunology laboratory is required which has 1) the capabilities of supporting the NIAID extramural AIDS vaccine effort by carrying out and reporting a variety of sophisticated and currently challenging immunologic and virologic evaluations on specimens obtained from participants in the vaccine trials, 2) the ability and commitment to rapidly adopt the newly developed, relevant tests which may be identified during the period of the contract, 3) the ability and commitment to transfer the technology suitable for dispersal to the individual AIDS Vaccine Evaluation Units, and 4) the capability of maintaining quality control of the assays performed at the AVEUs and at the central immunology laboratory.
