Core and Cohort Updates

Admin Core

croi reception

CROI reception at Back Bay Social on March 6th

The Admin Core team has spent the past few months preparing for the 7th URBAN ARCH Annual Meeting, which will be held on March 27-28, 2018 at Boston Medical Center/Boston University. We are excited to welcome investigators and staff from the cores and cohorts, as well as trainees and collaborators, to discuss findings from our original cohort projects, and provide updates on our renewal projects and affiliated studies.

repositoryDuring the annual Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) in Boston from March 4-7th, the Admin Core co-hosted a reception with Providence/Boston CFAR for HIV and substance se researchers. The reception was held on March 6th and was a great chance to meet with professionals in the field of HIV and substance use research from a wide range of disciplines.

The Admin Core has also been busy working on repository needs and requests. Carly Bridden, Christine Capozzi and Julia Canfield (pictured right) worked on pulling and shipping Russia ARCH plasma samples and DBS cards for HVL testing at the Miriam Hospital in Rhode Island and PEth testing at the United States Drug Testing Laboratories (USDTL) respectively. The shipments consisted of 354 plasma samples and 66 DBS cards. The team also facilitated a Materials Transfer Agreement for Uganda ARCH (ADEPTT) DBS and plasma specimens to be brought from Mbarara University of Science and Technology (MUST) in Uganda to Boston.

And finally, the Admin Core has been assisting Dr. Tibor Palfai and the Boston ARCH team with an IRB submission for the newly funded “Internet-based Videoconferencing to Address Alcohol Use and Pain among Heavy Drinkers in HIV-Care” that will be recruiting soon.

See you at the Annual Meeting!

annual meeting admin core

BDM CoreBDM

The BDM Core has been active on several fronts — we were instrumental in the recent launch of the Boston 4F Study and have also been helping to prepare the start of several other URBAN ARCH related studies including the DIPT Study, PETER PAIN, and HIV ACME.  We are also busy with several statistical analyses and manuscripts including the Russia ARCH analyses examining the relationship between alcohol and inflammatory biomarkers, for which we have been working closely with Yicheng Ma, a Biostatistics doctoral student at Boston University  (pictured right).

 

 

Uganda Cohort

As of March 1, 2018, we have enrolled 73 participants into the ADEPTT study. We have screened 419 participants with 323 eligible for further screening for latent TB, and 75 positive and eligible for the study. We’ve completed baseline procedures for all 73 participants, 66 two-week follow up study visits, 61 month-one visits, 56 month-two visits, 55 month-three visits, 39 month-four visits, 31 month-five visits, and 28 month-six visits. Twenty-two participants have completed their course of INH and will continue to be followed in the study. Five participants have discontinued TB preventive therapy (INH) due to grade 3/4 level toxicities. We recently added a third research assistant, Nicholas Mugisha, to our team in Uganda. We will continue to enroll participants from our previous ADEPT cohort for the next quarter, as well as recruit new participants from the ISS Clinic.

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l-r: Allen Kekibiina, Christine Ngabirano, Anita Katusiime, and Benton Amanya at a party held for Uganda ARCH staff last November

We have also been busy preparing to launch the DIPT Study, also in southwestern Uganda, leveraging our experiences thus far with the ADEPTT Study. The DIPT Study will examine whether economic incentives contingent on reduced alcohol use, assessed by point-of-care urine tests, reduces heavy alcohol use over six months of INH compared to a control group, and whether economic incentives contingent on INH positive point-of-care urine tests increases INH adherence over six months compared to a control group.

Russia Cohort and ZINC RCT

As of March 1st, St PETER has enrolled 115 participants and an additional 16 participants have continued on in the Russia ARCH cohort without enrolling into St PETER.  The team is also continuing to enroll participants from the St PETER trial into the embedded TMAO and ACME studies and administering additional study procedures, such as fecal sample collection, echocardiography, and liver fibroscans.IMG_9233[1]

pictured above: Russia ARCH’s Matthew Freidberg presenting his poster on “Zinc to Reduce Mortality and CVD Risk and HIV Disease Progression in Russian Drinkers” at the 2018 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI)

Earlier this month, study team members traveled to St. Petersburg, Russia to conduct a site visit at First St. Petersburg Pavlov State Medical University. The team performed quality control and study monitoring procedures, as well as training activities for the new PETER PAIN trial, which will begin recruitment in the spring.

The team is actively pursuing data analyses, abstract submissions and manuscript preparation.

Published Manuscripts:

Boston Cohort

Over the past few months, Boston ARCH 4F reached some milestones. The Biostatistics and Epidemiology Data Analytics Center (BEDAC) programmed, tested, and finalized the study’s online data collection and management tools. With these complete, Boston ARCH research assistants began reaching out to “legacy” participants (from the original cohort) to screen them for their eligibility for the 4F cohort. As of March 9th, we re-enrolled 9 participants and completed 8 baseline visits, which include a breath alcohol test, interview, physical assessment battery, saliva sample collection, and clinical blood draws. We look forward to re-enrolling as many legacy participants as possible, and recruiting new participants from the Center for Infectious Disease at Boston Medical Center in the coming months.

To assist with participant enrollment and data collection, Boston ARCH will soon be hiring an additional research assistant. Please see the BU Human Resources website for the job listing. Recent graduates with at least one year of professional experience and a passion for marginalized communities are encouraged to apply here.

l-r: Jasmin Choi, Mariana Krueger, Seville Meli, Kristine Erlandson, and Rich Saitz