Amid such dire economic times, we’re hard pressed to find positive funding news, but here’s something for the HIV research community. With a $100 million gift from the Phillip T. and Susan M. Ragon Institute Foundation, Mass General Hospital, MIT and Harvard are creating a new institute, the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard, focused on the development of a HIV vaccine.

Phillip Ragon is the founder and owner of a company in Cambridge that produces database software. The Boston Globe in this article tells an interesting story about how Ragon, trained as a physicist, came to be interested in the fight against HIV/AIDS.

Ragon was approached by Bruce Walker, a HIV researcher at MGH and director of the new institute, who told Ragon about his work in South Africa. Walker even accompanied Ragon on a trip to South Africa, taking him into clinics to see AIDS patients. Several months later, according to the article, Ragon and his wife decided to fund a HIV vaccine institute.

Goes to show what lengths some researchers go to these days to woo donors and get research funded.