Microsoft has announced that it will openly share the source code for a set of tools designed for AIDS vaccine research with the scientific community. The Redmond Company's initiative comes after two years of collaborative efforts in AIDS research. Microsoft's CodePlex website will host the source code made available free of charge to the international AIDS research community. The company revealed that it hopes the source code developed by Microsoft Research would be widely adopted and that will catalyze the production of an AIDS vaccine.

"We apply technology to some of the world's toughest technical and societal challenges," explained David Heckerman, who devotes himself to vaccine work as the lead researcher of the Machine Learning and Applied Statistics Group at Microsoft Research. "And with 10,000 people per day dying of AIDS, this world health crisis is certainly one of those challenges."

"The medical research tools developed by Microsoft prove that we can make more progress in the battle against HIV when experts in various fields pool their resources and work together," stated Dr. James Mullins, a professor in the University of Washington's Department of Microbiology in Seattle. "Our work with Microsoft Research to combine biological and computer sciences has already been very productive in moving our vaccine design efforts forward. I am quite certain that the tools that have and are being developed at Microsoft have far more exciting potential for closing in on the designs that will most likely bring success."

Given Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates' strong involvement into the research and development of an AIDS vaccine via the efforts of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, it is clear that he had something to do with the sharing of the source code across the AIDS research community. Microsoft's technologies began being adapted to AIDS vaccine research in February 2005.

According to Microsoft, researchers have two valid possibilities. Via the Microsoft's CodePlex website they can download a total of four software tools, and work with the pre-compiled programs or access the source code and build their own applications. Either way, this is a laudable and excellent initiative from Microsoft.

"Four tools derived from this effort have matured to the point where their code is ready to be shared with the overall AIDS research community," says Carl Kadie, research software design engineer and lead programmer for the project at Microsoft Research. "And we have other tools in the works, such as those that will help AIDS researchers track the evolution of the HIV virus in individuals over time."