The Clinical Translation (CT) Core

Powerful clinical strategies exist for people at risk for or living with HIV, with unprecedented promise of positive outcomes across the HIV care continuum. Yet, the HIV landscape is characterized by progress for some, but continuing gaps for others. Thus, it is imperative to identify, understand, and address the multi-level factors that impede adoption of HIV testing, prevention, and treatment strategies and, likely, use of a future HIV vaccine. These drivers include individual-level, contextual, system-level and structural factors, and co-occurring epidemics (e.g. racism, drug use and emerging infections, etc.). The Clinical Translation Core will advance the behavioral and biomedical clinical science research necessary for implementation of biomedical strategies that can “move the needle” on ending the global HIV epidemic. The Core will embrace a syndemic perspective that addresses social determinants of health as well as an implementation science perspective that identifies and addresses parameters for making innovations in real world practice. Its multidisciplinary faculty of HIV biomedical, health behavior, mental health, implementation research, epidemiology and bioinformatics researchers and their stakeholder partners uniquely equip the Core to catalyze and support research that bridges gaps between biomedical discovery, adaptation, and sustained implementation in often resource-constrained systems and underserved communities. In order to put forward the next generation of research leaders, two Early Stage Investigators (one biomedical, one behavioral) will have active roles in Core leadership and function. The Core has the following Specific Aims: (1) To promote application of behavioral science theory and formative methods to the development and use of new biomedical strategies for HIV prevention and treatment; (2) To stimulate development and evaluation of innovative, efficacious interventions that integrate biomedical strategies and health behavior theory and methods to maximize HIV prevention and treatment; (3) To maximize uptake and sustained use of existing biomedical HIV prevention and treatment strategies by promoting innovative application of behavioral and data science tools and an implementation science lens.