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Study from DRC shows mother-infant HBV treatment, prevention feasible

August 23, 2021
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...

NIH awards HIV Cure Center $26.2 million over next 5 years

August 23, 2021
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...

Boyce awarded Doris Duke funding for malaria study in Uganda

August 17, 2021
The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation has awarded Ross Boyce, MD, MSc, a 2021 Clinical Scientist Development Award for his research proposal entitled, “Getting malaria off the back of women and children in western Uganda,” which aims at reducing the incidence of malaria among infants and young children in rural Uganda....

Bamlanivimab reduces risk of COVID in skilled nursing homes and assisted living facilities, study finds

July 21, 2021
UNC’s Institute of Global Health and Infectious Diseases Director Myron Cohen, MD, is the lead investigator of a study recently published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that shows bamlanivimab monotherapy reduced the incidence of infection in skilled nursing homes and assisted living facilities with high risk of SARS-CoV-2 exposure. The...

Study compares mortality of people entering HIV care with general US population

July 21, 2021
HIV-related mortality has decreased since 1996 due to improved treatments and evolving care guidelines, but the extent to which persons entering HIV care have a higher risk for death over the following years, compared with peers in the general population, has been unclear. Joseph Eron, MD, the Herman and Louise...

Five UNC resident physicians and fellows named Global Health Scholars

May 27, 2021
  The Office of Global Health Education has selected its 2021-2023 cohort of Global Health Scholars. The competitive two-year program supports the career and leadership development of UNC fellows and resident physicians who have a strong interest in global health. The scholars’ selection includes $8,000 to support research proposals. Supporting...

Immunocompromised Host ID Fellows land faculty positions

May 9, 2021
The first two graduates of UNC’s Immunocompromised Host Infectious Disease Fellowship program have successfully landed faculty positions. Tyler Lambing, MD, the 2019-2020 fellow, has joined Baylor College of Medicine as an assistant professor. Daphne-Dominique Henson Villanueva, MD, the 2020-2021fellow, begins her post as an assistant professor at the West Virginia...

Baric elected to National Academy of Sciences

May 9, 2021
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...

Report from Malawi: Weathering a second wave—or tsunami—of COVID-19

February 10, 2021
  By Mina Hosseinipour, MD, MPH Officials announced the first confirmed case of COVID-19 in Malawi on April 2, 2020. At UNC Project Malawi, we’d been working for a month to carefully review and prepare for the virus. We established COVID preventive procedures and clinical management guidelines and planning for...

Office of Global Health Education funds COVID-19 research, service learning projects

February 2, 2021
Projects include vaccinating farmworkers arriving in North Carolina, managing data from Nicaragua, and testing blood samples from Africa   UNC’s Office of Global Health Education (OGHE) is awarding $23,000 to teams of global health faculty and medical students to pursue COVID-19 related research and service learning in the spring or...

‘What global health can accomplish’: UNC honors Hosseinipour’s dedication to mentoring with Distinguished Teaching Award

February 1, 2021
“Mina sees beyond what I see. She gives me the ‘aha moment,’ and I always ask myself how did I not see that. I keep aiming to do more and be the best in what I do because of her,” Mitch Matoga, MD, PhD, a senior researcher with UNC Project-Malawi,...

UNC investigators help prove a monoclonal antibody prevents, treats COVID-19 in nursing homes

January 21, 2021
  Eli Lilly today released results of a clinical trial that found bamlanivimab, a monoclonal antibody, significantly reduced the risk of contracting COVID-19 among residents and staff of long-term care facilities. The Phase 3 trial was conducted in partnership with the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and...

‘Why I’m still alive’: A patient’s gratitude, two decades later

January 13, 2021
In the summer of 2001, Shani Morgan was a few months pregnant and in prison, where she learned that she had HIV. She’d been sent from jail to Bragg Street Women’s Prison in Raleigh for better monitoring and medical treatment. What she remembers most about being treated by her UNC...

UNC’s infectious diseases program ranked 11th globally

January 4, 2021
U.S. News & World Report has ranked the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill 11th among universities globally for its infectious diseases program. The Best Global Universities rankings, now in their seventh year, focus on academic research, publications and citations, international collaboration, and overall reputation. This is the first time infectious...

A Safe Space

December 17, 2020
A collaborative team, drawing in part on experience working with disease outbreaks in Africa, has remarkably transformed UNC’s Medical Intensive Care Unit to treat COVID-19 patients. They’ve demonstrated that it’s possible to provide critical care for patients while keeping providers safe. Like most of us during the pandemic, Billy Fischer,...

Gates Foundation awards UNC Global Women’s Health $6.2 million to study pregnancy outcomes in Zambia

December 9, 2020
UNC Global Women’s Health has received two new grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for work on pregnancy outcomes in Zambia. The first grant funds the “Multi-omics for Mother and Infants (MOMI) Consortium,” which seeks to identify new predictive biomarkers for preterm birth, preeclampsia, stillbirth and fetal growth...

Three Institute faculty elected IDSA Fellows

December 7, 2020
The Infectious Diseases Society of America, the nation’s leading infectious diseases professional society, has elected the Institute’s Joseph Eron, MD; Anne Lachiewicz, MD, MPH; and Christopher Hurt, MD, to its latest cohort of Fellows of IDSA. As the highest honor in the field of infectious diseases, IDSA fellowships recognize those...

NIH awards seven-year funding to Cohen and El-Sadr for leadership of HIV Prevention Trials Network

November 30, 2020
AIDS Clinical Trials Group, co-led by UNC’s Joseph Eron, MD, also re-funded for seven years Myron S. Cohen, MD, director of UNC’s Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases, and Wafaa El-Sadr, MD, MPH, MPA, director of ICAP at Columbia University, have received a seven-year award from the National Institutes...

NIH awards $25 million to UNC’s Global HIV Clinical Trials Unit

November 30, 2020
  The National Institutes of Health has awarded University of North Carolina’s Institute for Global Health & Infectious Diseases nearly $25 million over seven years to continue operating its Global HIV Clinical Trials Unit, or CTU. The new funding will support HIV treatment and prevention in adults, children and pregnant...

NIH funds study aimed at improving access to COVID-19 testing for underserved North Carolina communities

November 30, 2020
  A team of investigators from UNC’s Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases has been awarded $1.5 million from the National Institutes of Health to conduct a two-year implementation science study to scale up COVID-19 testing in North Carolina. The researchers will examine the impact of a COVID screening...