Nathaniel R. Landau, PhD, is one of three 2018 Avant-Garde Award winners selected by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, part of the National Institutes of Health.
The awards provide $500,000 per year for up to five years to the winners to support their research projects. The awards are "intended to stimulate high-impact research that may lead to groundbreaking opportunities for the prevention and treatment of HIV/AIDS in drug users," according to the NIDA. This is the 11th year of the Avant-Garde Awards.
Dr. Landau, a professor in the microbiology department at New York City-based NYU Langone Health, will use the funds for his project titled, "Therapeutic Dendritic Cell Vaccine for HIV."
The project aims to develop a therapeutic vaccine that improves immune response to HIV, thereby allowing patients to discontinue or reduce antiretroviral drug regimens.
The other two 2018 Avant-Garde Award winners are Catherine A. Blish, PhD, MD, of Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., and Sara L. Sawyer, PhD, of University of Colorado Boulder.