Rockefeller Foundation Grantee Nominated for Prestigious Lancet Award
Nathan Golon, Courtesy of the International Center for AIDS Care and Treatment Programs (ICAP)
A research report on the largest clinical trial of HIV/AIDS treatment ever conducted in Africa (coordinated by the Medical Research Council in the UK, a Foundation grantee) has been nominated for a prestigious award, The Lancet medical journal’s Paper of the Year 2009. The research, published in the journal’s January 2010 issue (and online in December 2009) discovered that high-quality clinical monitoring reduces the need for expensive laboratory tests for people taking antiretroviral therapy.
Spending less money on laboratory tests means more money for drugs – and the authors conclude that up to 33% more people could be treated for HIV/AIDS using existing resources. According to Professor Diana Gibb, co-principal investigator of the study, this change in procedure could substantially reduce the number of people dying due to HIV infection, especially in developing countries.
During the six-year DART (“Development of Anti-Retroviral Therapy in Africa”) study, researchers working in Uganda and Zimbabwe compared two approaches to monitoring HIV/AIDS treatment in order to see if routine lab testing led to better outcomes. The outcomes suggest that careful clinical monitoring may avoid the need for some lab tests – which means that the HIV treatment used in this trial can be delivered safely and effectively in remote communities where laboratory services are not available.
This research paper by the DART Trial team, entitled Routine versus clinically driven laboratory monitoring of HIV antiretroviral therapy in Africa (DART): a randomised non-inferiority trial, was one of eight papers nominated for the Lancet Paper of the Year award.
Though the eight articles were nominated by a team of experts, the final winner will be picked by the public. Anyone can vote –it’s free. All you have to do is:
- Read the eight articles,
- Especially the full article of the HIV treatment research
- Go to the Lancet website and click on the white button to the left of your choice.
Voting ends February 11, 2010.
