New York Foundation Provides Facilities And Fellowships For AIDS Researchers

Fellowships For AIDS Researchers AUTHOR: BILLY GOODMAN, pg. 20, 25. During the mid-1980s, Irene Diamond, the widow of wealthy New York real estate executive Aaron Diamond, had been reading about AIDS. "I came to the conclusion that it was a terrible plague," she recalls, "and I wanted to get involved." Thus, the New York-based Aaron Diamond Foundation, established by her husband in 1955 to fund educational and cultural programs as well as some medical research, branched out to include AIDS funding. Today, the Foundation Center cites the philanthropy as the United States' leading private funder of AIDS research. Recently, the Diamond Foundation unveiled two initiatives in the fight against AIDS. This past spring, foundation officials dedicated a state-of-the-art research center, to which the organization pledged to contribute $8 million through 1993. Several months before that, the foundation announced a new, $16 million program of postdoctoral fellowships to support research on AIDS and drug abuse, for which it currently is taking applications. Public-Private Partnership The Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center for the City of New York is the culmination of a partnership of the public and private sectors. Adding to the foundation money, New York put up $3.4 million for renovating a floor of a city-owned building at 455 First Avenue, and offered a 20-year, $1-a-year lease to the center. The independent, nonprofit center progressed from idea to reality quickly. Stephen Joseph, health commissioner in former Mayor Edward Koch's administration, realized that the city urgently needed an AIDS research laboratory. He envisioned a facility with a viral containment lab, which, owing to financial and space constraints, few institutions could put together--a facility that would be free of the vagaries of city funding. In the fall of 1987, Joseph broached his idea with Irene Diamond, president of the Diamond Foundation, and with Vincent McGee, the foundation's executive director. Although Joseph had estimated that a group of foundations might be needed to fund the center, Diamond recalls, "I thought that would take too long, and that we should do it ourselves." Building A Team At present, two labs are up and running--that of director David Ho, a microbiologist, and Richard Koup, a cellular immunologist from the University of Massachusetts' School of Medicine. Ho, recruited last year from the University of California, Los Angeles, is hoping to fashion a team that will be expert in the molecular biology of both the human and ape immunodeficiency viruses, HIV and SIV. He would like to fill five more senior positions over the course of the next year, including researchers who will study the immune response to the virus, the pathogenesis of the virus, and clinical retrovirology, which, Ho says, means "applying techniques of the lab to patients." Although not a clinical laboratory, the Diamond AIDS center will, Ho envisions, take advantage of a large AIDS patient population, across the street at New York University Medical Center-Bellevue Hospital. Employment Opportunities With graduate students and postdoctoral scientists, the center is expected to employ about 50 researchers. The senior scientists will all hold full faculty appointments at New York University's School of Medicine. The laboratory's centerpiece, literally and figuratively, is a 4,000-square-foot area classified by the Centers for Disease Control as biosafety level-3 (BL-3), one of the largest BL-3 labs in the world devoted solely to AIDS, according to project architect Eugene Cole of Lord, Aeck & Sargent Inc. in Atlanta. One purpose of the large BL-3 space is to encourage collaboration, especially with scientists based at other New York institutions who may come to the center to carry out short projects. Within the BL-3 area is a severe combined immunodeficiency disease (SCID) mouse facility, which Koup says is one of few in the U.S. equipped for working with AIDS. Near the SCID mouse room is a fluorescence-activated cell sorter with a specially designed hood, so that researchers can work with live HIV-infected cells instead of having to kill them. Seed Money The Aaron Diamond Foundation began a grant program in basic AIDS research in 1985, one year after the death of its namesake. The foundation's first two AIDS research grants were for $150,000 each. Bijan Safai, of the department of dermatology at New York's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, was one of the recipients of those grants. "When you have some ideas in your head," says Safai, "you can't really get money for that. You need preliminary data, some proof that your hypothesis is close to reality, before you can get money from the government." The Diamond Foundation support, he says, was the seed money his team needed to do its work, examining why some HIV-infected individuals survive a long time with the virus. As a result of work done with that grant, he says, he was able to receive five years of support from the National Institutes of Health. While the Diamond Foundation has funded research on cancer and cardiovascular disease, it is now narrowing its biomedical focus to AIDS and drug abuse, according to executive director McGee. "We're interested in proposals to do basic science," he says, "but we're also looking at behavioral science, especially at the link between AIDS and drug abuse." Foundation officials decided to go beyond investigator-initiated grants, funding the center and postdoctoral fellowships--out of frustration. Says McGee: "New York City, with a bigger and bigger AIDS problem, was lagging behind in the level and quality of research." Fellowship Opportunities To encourage young researchers to begin their careers in the city and then stay there, the foundation established postdoctoral fellowships for research on AIDS or drug abuse. Up to 25 fellowships will be awarded in each of the next three years--as many as 20 in the biomedical sciences and five in the social sciences. Each fellowship provides support for two years with an optional third year of funding. The fellowship stipends start at $36,000, with an additional $30,000 in research and institutional allowances. The fellowships must include interdisciplinary work and must be used at a New York institution. They require a joint application from prospective fellow and prospective mentor. Fellowship applicants may choose a mentor from among the 130 identified by the foundation or may find their own. (Mentor scientists may also find their own prospective fellows.) The application deadline for the first year's fellowships is July 31. For more information, contact Ellen L. Rautenberg, Program Director, The Aaron Diamond Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellowships, New York State Health Research Council, 5 Penn Plaza, Room 308, New York, N.Y. 10001; (212) 613-2525. Scientists interested in applying for funds to do basic research on AIDS or drug abuse at an institution in New York are requested to send a letter outlining the work they would like to pursue to Vincent McGee, The Aaron Diamond Foundation, 1270 Avenue of the Americas, Suite 2624, New York, N.Y. 10020; (212) 757-7680. Later, they may be asked to submit a formal application. In the past, research grants have been for one to three years, in the range of $100,000 to $200,000 a year. Billy Goodman is a science writer based in Brooklyn, N.Y.

New York Foundation Provides Facilities And Fellowships For AIDS Researchers

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