Updates from 2nd Generation URBAN ARCH HIV/Alcohol P01s

The ARCHER team has been busy recruiting, screening, enrolling, and collecting data for the center’s Physical Activity Trial and Pain Trial. By way of our online recruitment campaign, which rolled out in 16 metropolitan areas across the Unites States, we have received completed pre-screening forms from over 200 potentially eligible participants. The ARCHER team continues to review these completed pre-screening forms, and contact potentially eligible participants for further eligibility screening and trial enrollment. We currently have 14 out of 250 participants enrolled and randomized in the Pain Trial, and 9 out of 220 participants enrolled and randomized in the Physical Activity Trial.

The ARCHER leadership team convened its second Program Advisory Committee (PAC) meeting in May. During this meeting, trial leads Dr. Palfai, Dr. Quintiliani and Dr. Abrantes reported on the progress of their respective ARCHER trials, and solicited the expertise of the PAC on challenges encountered during the first three months of recruitment, enrollment, and data collection. Many thanks to our five PAC members, Dr. Gary Bennett, Dr. Geetanjali Chander, Dr. Christopher Kahler, Dr. NiCole Keith and Dr. Jessica Merlin, who bring deep and diverse scientific expertise to ARCHER.

In May, the team welcomed Steven Miyawaki, who is joining ARCHER this summer as part of the Medical Student Summer Research Program (MSSRP). Steven is a rising second year medical student at Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine (BUCASM). After graduating from Bowdoin College in May 2020 with a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology, Steven worked as Research Assistant at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in the Emergency Medicine Department. Steven has an interest in addiction medicine, and has joined BUCASM’s Medical Students for Harm Reduction, volunteering at Boston Public Health Commission’s Access, Harm Reduction, Overdose Prevention and Education (AHOPE). Steven will assist the ARCHER team by screening potential participants for eligibility for each of the trials, scheduling eligible participants for baseline study assessments, and contributing to other study activities such as data cleaning.

We invite any interested investigators who wish to use existing Boston ARCH data for secondary analysis to contact ARCHER PI, Dr. Stein, or Kara Magane, Senior Director of Research Operations, for additional information.

The META HIV CVD PPG team has continued to work on the RCT (Project 1) at Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Therapeutic Clinical Research Site. This clinic has contributed to HIV research for over 20 years and is one of 29 AIDS Clinical Trials Group (ACTG) sites in the United States. Recently, we have received initial Institutional Review Board approval and are in the process of finalizing our data collection systems with assistance from Debbie Cheng, Greg Patts, and Sandra Deluccia from the Boston University Biostatistics and Epidemiology Data Analytics Center (BEDAC). We are awaiting our first shipment of study probiotic and placebo from ExeGi Pharma, LLC and will open to enrollment in Summer 2023. With expertise from the Integrated Metagenomic and Metabolomic Core Lab at the University of Louisville, we look forward to presenting the META HIV CVD (Project 2) initial analyses at RSA later this month. The Admin, Education, and Analytic Core is finalizing details for the second annual Alcohol and HIV satellite meeting at RSA. The satellite meeting will incorporate presentations from other NIAAA-funded groups including URBAN ARCH, ARCHER, VACS-HARP, and SHARC in addition to preliminary analysis from the META P01. See you there!