The Gates Foundation has played a major role in revitalizing research on the still largely neglected diseases of the world, like TB, malaria and HIV/AIDS. The foundation’s latest round of grants, 16 of them totaling $287 million over five years, is for AIDS vaccine research.

One of those grants, $18 million, has ended up in Boston, for Norman Letvin, the head of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center’s division of viral pathogenesis. The grant will be for work using engineered adenovirus and mycobacteria as the basis for HIV-1 vaccines.