Ross Boyce MD, MSc, partners with Western Carolina University and Mission Hospital to lay the foundation for effective patient care, prevention and public health awareness–funded by the State of North Carolina through the N.C. Collaboratory. In September of 2022, a 10-year-old in Brevard, North Carolina, complained of intense headaches, chills, fever, and extreme fatigue. Her mother … Read more

HIV virus eradication is a complex health challenge due to its long-lived persistence and how it hides in latently infected cells that escape the body’s immune system. Effective HIV treatments have decreased the likelihood of someone developing AIDS, while helping individuals live long and healthy lives without transmission to sexual partners. But for individuals with long-standing … Read more

The NIAID has awarded Arlene Seña, MD, MPH, a member of the Institute for Global Health & Infectious Diseases and professor of infectious diseases, $1.9 million to initiate a longitudinal clinical study over 16 months that will advance diagnostic product development for syphilis, with the potential for additional funding over another 3 years. The number … Read more

The National Cancer Institute has awarded a team of UNC researchers a five-year, $3 million grant to help develop studies to assess approaches to scalable, cost-effective screening and treatment strategies to prevent invasive cervical cancer among women living with HIV in low- and middle-income countries and in underserved communities in the United States. Co-principal investigators … Read more

Global health research is a collaborative process, and each researcher at the Institute for Global Health & Infectious Diseases contributes a piece to solving the puzzle of disease and morbidity. With a new academic year underway, read what some of our investigators are working on to improve the health of global populations. Their multi-disciplinary findings will be … Read more

The NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has awarded UNC’s Marcia Hobbs and Alex Duncan a five-year, $3.9 million grant to study how a vaccine recently developed to prevent life-threatening infections caused by group B Neisseria meningitidis, the MenB vaccine, may also protect people from infection with Neisseria gonorrhoeae, a sexually transmitted bacterial … Read more

Hepatitis B virus (HBV) remains endemic throughout sub-Saharan Africa despite the widespread availability of effective childhood vaccines. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, HBV treatment and birth-dose vaccination programs are not established. UNC School of Medicine researchers led a study to evaluate the feasibility and acceptability of HBV testing and treatment of pregnant women, … Read more

The National Institutes of Health has awarded approximately $53 million in annual funding over the next five years to 10 research organizations in a continued effort to find a cure for HIV. The new awards for the Martin Delaney Collaboratories for HIV Cure Research program, initiated in 2011, further expand the initiative’s 2016 renewal from six institutions to … Read more

Ralph S Baric, UNC’s William R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor of Epidemiology and professor of microbiology and immunology, was one of four UNC-Chapel Hill faculty members elected as part of a class of 120 new members to the National Academy of Sciences. The honor recognizes a member’s distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. Baric … Read more

Research looks at leveraging diagnostic technology to improve management of pediatric infections in low-resource settings Emily Ciccone, MD, MHS, a UNC clinical instructor and infectious diseases fellow, recently won first prize in the clinical research award session of the 2020 annual meeting of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. The award recognizes excellence … Read more

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, affirms the partners’ success resulting … Read more

  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 Institute of Allergy and Infectious … Read more

Black women in the southern United States are less likely to seek HIV prevention and treatment services because they don’t trust the health care system, according to a study in the September/October issue of The Journal of the Association of Nurses in AIDS Care (JANAC) by Schenita Randolph, PhD, MPH, at Duke University School of Nursing. … Read more

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 determine the safety and efficacy … Read more

  UNC Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases researchers have begun phase 2 and phase 3 evaluations of promising treatments for COVID-19. The UNC School of Medicine joins more than 25 initial sites participating in the clinical trials through ACTIV-2, a public-private partnership sponsored by the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases … Read more

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, cervical cancer and lymphoma. Leading … Read more

The National Institutes of Health has awarded Myron Cohen, MD, director of UNC’s Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases, and FHI 360 $9.2 million to support research through the new COVID Prevention Network (CoVPN). The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health has formed the network to better … Read more

By the spring of 2020, the urgency of the COVID-19 pandemic caused many researchers affiliated with UNC’s Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases to pivot their studies to focus on testing, treatment and prevention of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Here, a look at some of the projects underway in the last two years.   Development … Read more

  In the first COVID-19 case series of tocilizumab in the United States, UNC-Chapel Hill researchers report sobering results. They say the drug should be used judiciously until randomized clinical trials determine tocilizumab’s true efficacy. Meanwhile, medical students sidelined from clinical rotations by the virus conducted the research with lightning speed, all virtually. In the … Read more

  Large-scale study funded by NIAID and ViiV Healthcare halted early after cabotegravir, dosed every two months, shows higher efficacy than daily oral pill.   The decades-long search for a vaccine to prevent HIV reached a new milestone as results from HPTN 083, a global large-scale study, show that the long-acting drug cabotegravir (CAB LA) … Read more