The International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, a New York nonprofit group, plans to make grants totaling $10-million to biotech companies over the next three years for experiments to help develop an HIV vaccine, reports the Financial Times. The group has received an initial grant of $5-million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for its Innovation Fund and hopes to secure additional money in the near future.

Seth Berkeley, head of vaccine charity, believes that various scientific and research regulations have often prevented businesses from getting more involved in HIV-vaccine development. He says, “We need people to undertake extremely high-risk research, and there is currently no mechanism to do that.”

He hopes that a strong financial incentive will propel small- to medium-size biotech companies to test their ideas for an HIV vaccine.