The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, has awarded eight contracts to strengthen and expand its nationwide group of institutions conducting clinical trials of promising candidate vaccines and therapies for infectious diseases. In addition to increasing the number of sites from seven to eight, NIAID expects the Vaccine and Treatment Evaluation Units (VTEUs) to carry out more clinical trials in larger populations and to safely test vaccines in specific vulnerable populations, such as infants and the elderly. Moreover, all the VTEUs will have inpatient beds for isolating volunteers who participate in the testing of vaccines containing weakened versions of live microbes, making it easier to conduct such trials quickly.
