The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced $287 million in grants on Wednesday to create an international network of 16 labs to try new approaches to making a vaccine against AIDS.
The foundation says it wants the programme to transform the so-far unsuccessful Aids vaccine effort by rewarding individual labs that come up with innovative ideas and helping them develop those ideas, but also ensuring that they collaborate with other researchers, who under ordinary circumstances would often be considered rivals.
"This is the foundation's largest-ever investment in HIV vaccine development. In fact, it's our largest-ever package of grants for HIV and AIDS," Dr Nicholas Hellmann, acting director of the Gates Foundation's HIV, TB, and Reproductive Health program, told reporters in a telephone briefing.
The best hope with current approaches is to perhaps delay infection, or make the infection less destructive, in some people.
"Progress has simply not been fast enough," Dr Hellmann said.
The 16 grants will go to more than 165 investigators in 19 countries, some of them top names in AIDS research and some less well-known.
The Aids virus infects close to 40 million people and 25 million people have died of AIDS since 1981. HIV kills 8,000 people a day, most in Africa and many of them women and children.
There is no cure, although drugs can help control the virus and can sometimes help prevent it from being passed along.