The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has given the University of NSW (UNSW) $18 million ($US12.42 million) to conduct research into maximising the effectiveness of HIV anti-retroviral drugs.

According to The Age, it’s one of the largest private grants ever received by the University. The study, which will utilise almost 700 HIV positive people internationally, aims to discover if lower doses of HIV medications will impact on their effectiveness. The smaller the required dose, the larger the number of people that can be treated for the same cost.

It’s been said that some 40 million people in the world currently live with HIV. Over the next six years the World Health Organisation wants to increase the number of HIV positive people being treated in developing countries through government support or other schemes. At the moment it’s over three million people, by 2015 they hope for it to be nine million.

Professor Sean Emery, of the National Centre in HIV Epidemiology and Clinical Research, told The Age that millions of extra lives could be saved this way.

“When people make decisions about doses they tend to go for something nearer the maximum tolerated dose rather than the minimum effective dose. On that basis, there is a view that with certain drugs, not all, but it is quite proper and appropriate to look at whether we could get away with… lower unit doses.”

Emery says that this other avenues of making the drugs cheaper had already been explored – from chemical make-up through to manufacture and the supply chain.

The study will be called ENCORE (Evaluation of Novel Concepts in Optimisation of antiRetroviral Efficacy) and it’s expected that the results will be published by mid-2013.