NIH awards more than $20 million to international HIV database centers

WHAT:
The National Institutes of Health has renewed grants to seven regional centers that compose the International epidemiology Databases to Evaluate AIDS (IeDEA), awarding $20.8 million in first-year funding. The 15-year-old IeDEA program efficiently advances knowledge about HIV by pooling and analyzing de-identified health data from more than two million people with HIV on five continents to answer research questions that individual studies cannot address. The grants are expected to last five years and to total an estimated $100 million.

The IeDEA program addresses local, national and global questions about illness and death in people with HIV to accelerate progress toward ending the pandemic. The program also provides data to international partners such as the World Health Organization (WHO) to inform global health policy. In addition, IeDEA builds global health research infrastructure to help the next generation of scientists address questions important to their geographical regions. Finally, the program works to improve the quality of international health data by identifying gaps in both data and analytical methods and determining how to fill them.

The new funding will enable the program to add a Sentinel Research Network (SRN) to prospectively collect cardiovascular, cancer, lung, metabolic, substance use and mental health data to characterize the sizeable impact of non-communicable diseases on people with HIV today. The SRN will consist of at least two HIV clinics per region that collect data on non-communicable diseases as well as on hepatitis, the level of HIV in the blood, and a patient’s level of immune health. These clinics will be located in low- and middle-income countries, where such information often is not gathered.

The new funding also will enable IeDEA to do in-depth assessments of tuberculosis in close collaboration with the Regional Prospective Observational Research in Tuberculosis (RePORT) International consortium, addressing cutting-edge questions in tuberculosis clinical care and pathogenesis.

IeDEA will continue to shorten the time from data generation to meaningful public health knowledge through partnerships with public-health implementers, data scientists and international organizations such as WHO and UNAIDS. The program’s Fogarty-IeDEA Mentorship Program will continue to help competitively selected early-stage investigators formulate hypotheses, conduct analyses, write papers and participate in scientific meetings. With data collected from more than 200,000 people under age 19, IeDEA will continue to conduct cutting-edge pediatric and adolescent HIV research, including studies of infant survival and antiretroviral drugs.

The IeDEA data centers receiving renewed funding represent the regions of Asia and Australia; the Caribbean, Central America and South America; North America; Central Africa; East Africa; Southern Africa; and West Africa. Each center consolidates, curates and analyzes data on the care and treatment of people with HIV in multiple countries in its region to cost-effectively evaluate their health outcomes.

Half of the new funding for IeDEA comes from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of NIH. The other half comes from the following NIH institutes and centers: the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development; the Fogarty International Center; the National Cancer Institute; the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism; the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases; the National Institute on Drug Abuse; the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute; and the National Institute of Mental Health.

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More information about the IeDEA program is available at IeDEA.org.

WHO:
Carl W. Dieffenbach, Ph.D., director of the NIAID Division of AIDS, is available to discuss the IeDEA program and grant renewal.

CONTACT:
To schedule interviews, please contact Laura S. Leifman, (301) 402-1663, [email protected].

NIAID conducts and supports research–at NIH, throughout the United States, and worldwide–to study the causes of infectious and immune-mediated diseases, and to develop better means of preventing, diagnosing and treating these illnesses. News releases, fact sheets and other NIAID-related materials are available on the NIAID website.

About the National Institutes of Health (NIH): NIH, the nation’s medical research agency, includes 27 Institutes and Centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. NIH is the primary federal agency conducting and supporting basic, clinical, and translational medical research, and is investigating the causes, treatments, and cures for both common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and its programs, visit http://www.nih.gov/.