International grant funds HIV research

UKZN and Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health professors have been awarded a very prestigious international grant to fund their work in HIV prevention in rural KwaZulu-Natal.

UKZN’s College of Health Science’s Prof Frank Tanser, based in the Wellcome Trust’s Africa Centre for Population Health (Africa Centre), together with Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health’s Prof Till Bärnighausen, were recently awarded the prestigious five-year National Institutes of Health (NIH) R01 multi-million rand grant (up to R40 million), bringing their highly successful collaboration on cutting edge HIV intervention research into the second decade.

The goals of the new project, funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) within NIH, are to reduce high rates of HIV-related mortality among men and to reduce the high levels of HIV incidence in young women.

The project seeks to use a cutting-edge micro-incentive intervention to recruit more men into care and onto lifesaving anti-retroviral therapy. If successful, the intervention will ensure that men in particular will enter ART treatment programmes much earlier and in greater numbers. This in turn will lead to higher levels of HIV viral suppression among men, thereby preventing HIV transmissions to women.

The intervention that will be developed and tested as part of this work has three key components: it is home-based, it offers small financial incentives (which have been shown to work in a pilot study), and it offers gender-specific enhanced advice and counselling to motivate linkage and subsequent retention in care.

The expected outcome of this work is a developed and evaluated targeted intervention to drive back the HIV epidemic in HIV hyper endemic communities in Southern Africa. In many communities, large fractions of men needing antiretroviral treatment (ART) are not receiving HIV treatment, despite an overall rapid ART scale-up. HIV-related mortality continues to be the most common cause of death and HIV incidence in many communities remains high, in particular among young women.

“The solution to both of these seemingly intractable problems is to encourage more men into HIV care and onto anti-retroviral therapy. To this end we felt that it was vital that we take a multi-disciplinary approach to finding a solution to these twin problems and so have enlisted the help of a team of scientists from diverse backgrounds to design and test a cutting-edge intervention to bring men into HIV programmes,” said Bärnighausen.

Tanser and Bärnighausen lead highly productive research teams at the Africa Centre and Harvard.

“We believe that this grant will enable us to take our research to the next level and it gives us a real opportunity to intervene in the most vulnerable groups,” said Tanser.

Bärnighausen added: “We are grateful to the NIH to have again recognised that our research at the Africa Centre has the potential to find solutions to the most pressing problems in HIV today.”