UCLA receives $5 million grant for sharing research on AIDS and substance abuse

The National Institute on Drug Abuse has awarded $5 million to researchers at UCLA to develop a resource and data center for millions of pieces of research, lab samples, statistics and other data aimed at boosting research into the effects of substance abuse on HIV/AIDS.The five-year grant, called Collaborating Consortium of Cohorts Producing NIDA Opportunities, will connect groups of investigators with National Institute on Drug Abuse-funded research and data ranging from state-of-the-art bioinformatics to laboratory specimens, said Pamina Gorbach, professor of epidemiology at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health and the principal investigator on the project.“This consortium will allow researchers from across the United States and Canada to access an enormous amount of highly detailed datasets to use in research on HIV among substance-using populations,” said Gorbach, who is also a professor of medicine in the division of infectious diseases at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.Gorbach is also a principal investigator of one of the research groups within the consortium. Called the mSTUDY, this project assesses the impact of substance use on the spread of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections among HIV-positive and high-risk HIV-negative men of color who have sex with men.  This project collects biological specimens and demographic, clinical, laboratory and behavioral data on more than 500 men who have sex with men. Steven Shoptaw, a professor of f...
Source: UCLA Newsroom: Health Sciences - Category: Universities & Medical Training Source Type: news