Recent Updates from META HIV CVD

September 2023: The META HIV CVD Program Project Grant team highlight for the past quarter was hosting our second annual Satellite Meeting to the Research Society on Alcoholism’s Annual Meeting. The Admin, Education, and Analytic Core, with support from members of the Integrated Metagenomic and Metabolomic Core Lab at the University of Louisville, organized this meeting titled “Alcohol Research Involving People with HIV.” It was held in Bellevue, Washington and featured presentations from Drs. Kendall Bryant, Matt Freiberg, Scott Edwards, Tibor Palfai, Theresa Kim, Judy Hahn, Lesley Park, Alex Yaw Werekuu, Aakarsha Rao, Natalie Chichetto, Robert Cook, and Shirish Barve. These presenters represented the following groups: The Southern HIV and Alcohol Research Consortium, NOAH’S ARC, ARCHER, the Veterans Aging Cohort Study, the TN and Providence/Boston Centers for AIDS Research, and, of course, International URBAN ARCH. We concluded the day with an invigorating one-on-one mentoring session for early-career investigators and senior investigators organized by Natalia Gnatienko at URBAN ARCH. We plan to continue and expand this satellite meeting in upcoming years.

Since the meeting, the META team has continued to work on launching the randomized controlled trial which will recruit at Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Therapeutic Clinical Research Site. Project Manager Grace Wallace is leading these efforts by finalizing a critical IRB amendment, with assistance from the Boston University Biostatistics and Epidemiology Data Analytics Center (BEDAC). We aim to recruit our first patient by the time of the next newsletter update.