Paul Drain—an Associate Professor in the Department of Global Health, Medicine and Epidemiology at the University of Washington—and his research team have received a new grant from the CoMotion Innovation Gap Fund, a program intended to help bridge the gap between academic research grants and the level of development needed to obtain investment. Drain’s project is titled “Rapid test for measuring adherence to antiretroviral therapy and pre-exposure prophylaxis”.  

Globally, 25 percent of new HIV cases occur among young women and adolescent girls in Africa. Pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, prevents infection when taken consistently, but stigma around the disease keeps some young women from maintaining usage, according to a new review by researchers at the University of Washington.

UW Department of Global Health researchers presented new HIV prevention findings at the HIV Research for Prevention (HIVR4P 2018) conference in Madrid. HIVR4P is the only global scientific conference focused exclusively on the challenging and fast-growing field of biomedical HIV prevention research.  The conference supports global cross-fertilization among research on HIV vaccines, microbicides, PrEP, treatment as prevention, and other biomedical prevention approaches.

By Tony Kirby

"The last person that I train, I want that training to be in something other than HIV", says Jared Baeten. Speaking to The Lancet Infectious Diseases from the HIV Research for Prevention Conference (HIVR4P) in Chicago, IL, where he brought a 12-strong team of his researchers, Baeten explains: “When that time comes, I want HIV to have been eliminated as public health threat, so we can focus on other diseases”.