In the ancient Chinese city of Xi'an, where the Silk Road originated, Bruce Walker is collaborating with a network of local scientists and clinicians. Their intent is to bolster China's HIV/AIDS research capacity, to provide important data for international researchers, and to apply the results to improving treatments.

After years of playing down the threat from HIV/AIDS, China's health officials are now serious about the disease, which was responsible for the deaths of at least 25,000 Chinese in 2005. That same year, an estimated 650,000 people in China were HIV-positive. Scaling up HIV treatment, care, and support will become increasingly important, as some experts predict there may be more than 10 million HIV-infected Chinese by 2010.

Walker's collaboration with Chinese HIV experts is an offshoot of a National Institutes of Health contract to study immune responses and host genetics in different regions of the HIV epidemic. "We started in South Africa and based on our success there were able to expand to China as a newly emerging epidemic came to be recognized," says Walker. Through a scientific colleague in Beijing, Walker met Yongtao Sun—an immunology professor who also heads the Department of Infectious Diseases at Tangdu Hospital in Xi'an—and invited him to visit Boston for several months, in 2002, to learn more about the clinical treatment of HIV and about basic research techniques.

Walker "taught me how to use [antiretroviral therapy] to treat AIDS patients and how to conduct research related to clinical care," recalls Sun. Walker's group also helped train three junior researchers from Sun's department at Tangdu in basic research techniques for characterizing HIV-1-specific T-cell responses. "Now all four of us have returned to China to work at the front lines of fighting against HIV/AIDS," says Sun, who has established an immunology lab in Xi'an, a metropolitan area of more than 6 million in north-central China. "We apply Bruce's knowledge, experience, and expertise to scale up HIV treatment, care, and support" in impoverished areas around Xi'an, he says.

Yiming Shao, the head of China's National Center for AIDS/STD Control and Prevention, in Beijing, recently invited Walker to speak to the center's scientists. The Boston researcher complied, and he used the occasion to propose further joint research ventures.

"In China, we're trying to build research capacity with collaborations," Walker says, adding that his goal there, as elsewhere, is "to push the interface between research and HIV/AIDS clinical care."

—R.K.