Project Grant R21AI203571

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases awarded The Henry M. Jackson Foundation for the Advancement of Military Medicine, Inc., $317,272 on August 1, 2026, under the Allergy and Infectious Diseases Research program (CFDA 93.855) to develop a structure-based sieve analysis pipeline for understanding antibody-mediated immunity in HIV-1 vaccine and monoclonal antibody prevention trials.

The award funds two aims: development of a structure-based sieve analysis framework that defines critical structural elements using publicly available or modeled antigen structures and develops structural similarity metrics to compare extracted elements between antigen structures; and validation of the framework on prior vaccine and antibody prevention efficacy trials, including the RV144 vaccine trial and the HVTN 703/HPTN 081 and HVTN 704/HPTN 085 trials of the VRC01 monoclonal antibody. The project will use AlphaFold3 to predict protein structures from thousands of HIV-1 sequences available from clinical trial participants and develop analysis methods that accurately measure similarity across three-dimensional antigen structures. The methodology will be applicable to other pathogens.

The recipient is The Henry M. Jackson Foundation, headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, a non-profit organization. Work is performed at Silver Spring, Maryland. The period of performance runs from August 1, 2026, through July 31, 2028. This is a Project Grant assistance type.