The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) has made the first three grants under its new Avant-Garde Awards program, designed to support groundbreaking research into preventing and treating HIV/AIDS among people with drug addictions.

Each grantee will received $500,000 per year for five years. Fifty-two researchers applied for the grants.

The initial recipients include Jerome Groopman, M.D., professor of medicine at the Harvard Medical School and chief of the Division of Experimental Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston; Julio Montaner, M.D., professor of medicine at the University of British Columbia and director of the British Columbia Center for Excellence in HIV/AIDS; and Ileana Cristea, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University.

Groopman's research will explore ways to prevent the AIDS virus from moving through the lymphatic system, while Montaner will research whether retroviral drugs can be used as AIDS prevention on a population-wide basis among drug users. Cristea will look at how the HIV virus hijacks proteins involved in gene expression.