Category: News

Study led by female investigators enrolled women living with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa A long-acting injectable drug, cabotegravir, is safe and more effective than a daily pill in preventing HIV acquisition, according to results from a study of 3,127 cisgender women in sub-Saharan Africa. Led by UNC researchers beginning in...

Six students from Dzama, Malawi — three girls and three boys — have received scholarships to attend private school and receive individual tutoring as the inaugural class of “Charlie Scholars.” The Charlie van der Horst Malawi Scholars Program, administered by UNC Project-Malawi and the UNC Medical Foundation, honors the late...

The HIV Medicine Association, or HIVMA, has honored UNC infectious diseases professor Ada Adimora, MD, MPH, with its 2020 Clinical Educator Award. The award, presented during the annual IDWeek conference, recognizes Adimora’s “extraordinary contributions to advancing clinical education, with a focus on disseminating her research on the drivers of HIV-related...

Human beings will continue to suffer from infectious diseases, some of them contagious. To fight a new disease, infectious disease physicians first work to determine the rules that govern the disease, its spread, and the gravity of the infection. Those rules then determine our prevention and treatment strategies, Institute Director...

Cell Microsystems and UNC’s HIV Cure Center will continue their work on developing an automated assay that can measure single cells for latent HIV, thanks to a two-year, $1.65 million contract from the National Institutes of Health. The new contract, a highly competitive phase II Small Business Innovation Research award,...

  A team of researchers led by UNC Project-Malawi has received a one-year, $500,000 grant to build clinical and research capacity in Malawi to better diagnose and treat children with sickle cell disease. The funding is a joint award from the NIH’s National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and National...

Ernest Grant, RN, PhD, FAAN, president of American Nurses Association and an African American, shares why he is participating in COVID-19 vaccine trial   Spending a few hours at a University of North Carolina Health clinic, giving his health history and receiving an injection, might not be Ernest Grant’s favorite...

On the heels of FDA authorization of convalescent plasma as a treatment for COVID-19, UNC researchers are conducting a clinical trial to determine the safety and efficacy of plasma that includes a higher amount of neutralizing antibodies against SARS-CoV-2. The new Coronavirus-inactivating Plasma (CoVIP) research clinical trial is designed to...

A team of UNC researchers are partnering with colleagues at four institutions in Africa to study HIV-associated malignancies. With a five-year, $6 million grant from the NIH’s National Cancer Institute, the research consortium will look at screening and diagnosing innovations for three cancers common to people with HIV: Kaposi sarcoma,...

Our dear friend, Dr. Peter Kazembe, a Malawian colleague, pediatrician and adjunct professor of medicine with the University of North Carolina’s Institute for Global Health and Infection Diseases, died on August 11, 2020 at the age of 65 while receiving treatment for cancer in South Africa. He is survived by...

“There are few people like him,” as a long-term collaborator and friend said. “Steve was so humble and generous that I don’t think he really understood the impact he had on the people around him. He profoundly changed for the better the lives of so many people he worked with...

Five fellows joined UNC’s Division of Infectious Diseases in July for the 2020-2021 academic year. The trainees gain clinical and research experience along with career guidance and mentoring by the division’s faculty members. One of the fellows, Daphne-Dominique Henson Villanueva, MD, will be doing advanced training in immunocompromised host infectious...