NIMH awards Center for AIDS Intervention Research $11.16 million grant

Medical College of WisconsinSep 15 2009

The Medical College of Wisconsin's Center for AIDS Intervention Research (CAIR) received a five-year, $11.16 million grant from the National Institutes of Health's National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) to continue its HIV prevention research.

A national and international resource in AIDS prevention, CAIR faculty and staff develop, conduct, and evaluate new interventions to prevent HIV among persons most vulnerable to the disease. These research findings are disseminated to the scientific community and also directly to service providers so they can integrate behavioral and social science advances in their service programs in order to reduce the public health toll of HIV/AIDS. CAIR's research also focuses on the prevention of adverse health and mental health outcomes among persons living with HIV infection and their loved ones.

CAIR is one of only five HIV behavioral research centers in the country designated by the NIMH, a distinction the center has held since 1994. Jeffrey A. Kelly, Ph.D., professor of psychiatry and behavioral medicine and director of CAIR since its inception, is principal investigator for the renewal grant.

With this grant, the Center's future research will continue to focus on:

• HIV prevention in population segments in the United States that continue to experience high disease incidence, including gay or bisexual men, drug users, and women at risk for HIV, especially racial and ethnic minorities who remain disproportionately impacted by AIDS;
• Expansion of its international HIV prevention research programs in countries with heavy HIV disease threat and burden including in the post-Soviet region, Africa, and Latin America;
• Strategies to quickly move HIV prevention research advances into the hands of frontline public health service providers throughout the U.S. and the world;
• Measuring the effectiveness of HIV prevention programs when carried out in the field by service provider agencies;
• Measuring the results of structural and policy-related interventions to prevent HIV/AIDS and care more compassionately for persons living with the disease.
• Evaluating the cost-effectiveness of HIV prevention efforts and analysis methods, including the savings associated with implementing improved HIV prevention.

Since its inception, CAIR investigators have collectively published over 600 scientific articles describing scientific advances related to the center's research goals. The center collaborates with hundreds of AIDS service organizations, health departments and public health programs worldwide, and its investigators have been awarded a cumulative total of approximately $123 million in HIV/AIDS research funding.