ERC Einstein Rockefeller CUNY Center for AIDS Research

PROJECT SUMMARY ERC-CFAR: CLINICAL AND TRANSLATIONAL SCIENCE CORE (CTSC) To help meet the vision of Ending the HIV Epidemic (EHE), the Einstein-Rockefeller-CUNY Center for AIDS Research (ERC-CFAR) has formed strong collaborations both within and beyond our partner institutions, including the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, to catalyze and support research that best serves the public’s health: to eradicate HIV infection, prevent new HIV infections, and improve the health of people living with HIV (PWH). The overarching goal of the ERC-CFAR and the Clinical and Translational Science Core (CTSC) is to support the EHE mission by creating a broad and robust resource available to researchers within our walls as well as nationally and globally. Our synergistic partnership provides a broad range of support for clinical, translational, health services, and implementation science investigations. By leveraging the resources of the Einstein CTSA-funded Institute for Clinical and Translational Research, the CTSC provides access to a robust clinical database and multiple biorepositories. The Clinical Cohort Database (CCDB), derived from the Montefiore/Einstein clinical services, has ~20,000 PWH and 475,000 HIV-negative patients; >6200 PWH are in active care; 43% are women, 48% Hispanic/Latinx and 41% African American. This comprehensive, longitudinal database accesses Montefiore’s extensive clinical infrastructure and has fostered an explosion of clinical prevention and treatment, epidemiologic, translational, health services and implementation science research. We facilitate enrollment of well-characterized patients (including HIV-negative controls) into new research protocols. Through CTSC resources the clinical population at Montefiore/Einstein enables research at Rockefeller, which lacks access to defined cohorts of PWH, recruiting new participants for Rockefeller’s cutting-edge research in HIV eradication. The City University of New York (CUNY) is a leader in implementation science assessing the factors that influence our ability to impact favorably on the public’s health with interventions of proven efficacy. The CTSC is integrated into the Scientific Working Group, a driver of the ERC-CFAR’s scientific direction, to provide optimal support to the emerging research activities, and foster cross- fertilization among cores and the SWG. We will leverage Einstein’s Center for Health Data Innovations and use of state-of-the-art informatics methods, including natural language processing and machine learning, to catalyze and facilitate new research in primary prevention of HIV infection, while maintaining our extensive support of well-established research areas.