For nearly 15 years, Dennis Burton worked on a project aimed at solving what he calls "one of the most difficult problems in biomedicine" — creating an HIV vaccine.

That work was funded by the largest National Institutes of Health-funded program devoted to such research, with a seven-year grant totaling $258 million, and is considered one of the leading vaccine efforts. On May 30, he learned that work will end. In a video call, NIH officials told him that the Trump administration was terminating the program next year.

"It's just devastating. So much human toil has gone into this," says the Scripps Research Institute immunologist. "Just when it looked like we could beat this virus, we're going to give up."

Designing an effective HIV vaccine has proven immensely challenging for resear

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