To tackle the human health challenges that face the world today, the FNIH develops collaborations with top experts from government, industry, academia and the not-for-profit sector and provides a neutral environment where we can work productively toward a common goal.
Two billion people worldwide are infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) resulting in 10 million cases of clinical disease and 1.5 million deaths each year. The hurdles for developing a highly protective and durable vaccine against Mtb require addressing four central tenets of T cell immunology – magnitude, quality, breadth, and location of the response. These specific elements of the problem will be addressed by focusing on how altering the route of vaccination using a whole attenuated organism vaccine substantially increases immune responses and protection in a rigorous non-human primate model of Mtb infection.
The Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (FNIH) Biomarkers Consortium’s Plasma Abeta project will evaluate next generation plasma Aβ assays to determine whether plasma Aβ peptide ratios increase the probability of identifying patients with amyloid positivity to improve clinical trial screening efficiency and reduce clinical trial costs for early stages of Alzheimer’s Disease.
Gene drive is a mechanism that can promote the preferential inheritance of a beneficial genetic trait, thereby increasing its prevalence in a population. A variety of gene drive mechanisms occur in nature that can cause specific genetic elements to spread throughout populations in varying degrees. Researchers have long sought to harness these naturally occurring gene drive mechanisms to prevent the transmission of mosquito or other insect-borne diseases that pose some of society's most intractable public health problems.
The Moderate Alcohol and Cardiovascular Health Trial (MACH15) is a longitudinal, international clinical trial to determine the effects of moderate alcohol use on cardiovascular disease and diabetes.
In 2016, the AMP Executive Committee approved the planning of an AMP effort to confront the challenges presented by Parkinson’s disease (PD). This complements current efforts in the areas of Alzheimer’s disease, type 2 diabetes and the autoimmune disorders of rheumatoid arthritis and systemic lupus erythematosus (lupus). A critical component of this partnership is that all members have agreed to make the AMP Parkinson’s disease (AMP PD) data and analyses publicly available to the broad biomedical community.
The project provides the FNIH management and advisory services for research programs seeking to develop new cost-effective and sustainable biologic strategies for controlling mosquito-borne infections like malaria and dengue fever.
As part of a larger national effort to address the opioid crisis, the FNIH is leading the planning effort for a potential public-private scientific partnership that includes the NIH, FDA, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) and more than 30 biopharmaceutical companies.
The Partnership for Accelerating Cancer Therapies (PACT) is a five-year public-private research collaboration totaling $220 million launched by the National Institutes of Health, the FNIH and 12 leading pharmaceutical companies as part of the Cancer Moonshot. PACT will initially focus on efforts to identify, develop and validate robust biomarkers — standardized biological markers of disease and treatment response — to advance new immunotherapy treatments that harness the immune system to attack cancer. The partnership will be managed by the FNIH.
A collaborative program that provides standardized and research level assays for clinical and pre-clinical HIV vaccine trials.