Fogarty International Center Awards Research Training Grants to Tackle AIDS and Tuberculosis

The Fogarty International Center (FIC), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), today announced it funded institutions in Brazil and Zimbabwe, along with partner institutions in the United States, to establish research training programs to improve in-country capacity to fight AIDS and TB.

The awards were made through FICs International Clinical, Operational, and Health Services Research Training Award Program for AIDS and Tuberculosis (ICOHRTA-AIDS/TB).

One group of partner awardees includes Dr. Jose R. Lapa e Silva of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and Dr. Richard Chaisson of Johns Hopkins University. They will establish a research training program at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro to develop a new cadre of clinical and health service researchers who will contribute toward controlling TB and TB-HIV co-infection in Brazil.

The other group includes Dr. Peter Mason of the Biomedical Research and Training Institute and Dr. David Katzenstein of Stanford University. They will establish a research training program in Zimbabwe to strengthen the capacity of African scientists to design, develop and conduct effective, relevant and ethical research studies, focusing on HIV, TB and other opportunistic infections.

The ICOHRTA-AIDS/TB program supports research training to strengthen skills needed to design and conduct AIDS and TB research for the scale-up of promising interventions to the population and healthcare system levels. This new funding brings the total of awards to 12 and includes eight that were initially made in 2004 for sites in China, Haiti, Russia and Uganda. FIC will add $6 million for these awards to the previous total of $12 million made by FIC and its NIH partners and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

"As treatment drugs become more available, a pressing need will be to monitor and evaluate their effectiveness in the population. This program supports the research training to meet that need," said Sharon Hrynkow, PhD, FIC acting director, speaking on behalf of the program sponsors.

FIC developed ICOHRTA-AIDS/TB in collaboration with NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, National Cancer Institute, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institute of Mental Health, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, Office of AIDS Research, and Office of Research on Women's Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and USAID.

"These additional research training programs in Brazil and Zimbabwe will strengthen the in-country capacity so that large-scale prevention, treatment and care interventions are locally relevant and effective," noted Jeanne McDermott, CNM, MPH, PhD, program officer for FIC ICOHRTA AIDS/TB.

Source: NIH