Miller School Infectious Disease Specialists Highlight HIV Work at Peru Conference
Infectious diseases experts Dr. Susanne Doblecki-Lewis and Dr. Laura Beauchamps speak about outreach efforts and emerging therapies to help at-risk populations.
University of Miami Miller School of Medicine infectious disease researchers recently presented at theHIV Research for Prevention conference, HIVR4 P2024, in Lima, Peru. Sponsored by the International AIDS Society (IAS), the meeting focused on emerging therapies and outreach techniques to help at-risk communities stay healthy.
UM has long been at the epicenter of the HIV epidemic, and Miller School researcher/clinicians presented on their efforts to reach underserved communities and get people access to pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), which can prevent infection, and other HIV/AIDS drugs.
Recently, we chatted with Susanne Doblecki-Lewis, M.D., a professor of medicine, chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases and director of HIV prevention at the Miller School, and Laura Beauchamps, M.D., associate professor of clinical medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases, who shared their experiences at the conference.
What is HIVR4P 2024?
Dr. Doblecki-Lewis: IAS sponsors a number of annual meetings, and R4P is a smaller, prevention-focused conference. This year, it was held in Peru, which has strong academic institutions and close affiliations with the National Institutes of Health’s HIV prevention networks.
The conference rotates every year, usually to a different continent, to highlight the various challenges those nations and, particularly, the host country, are facing. We learned a lot about the epidemic in South America and their efforts to control it.
Dr. Beauchamps: This is a smaller conference than our annual infectious disease conference from IDSA, yet I found that the attendants were very engaged. It has a vast amount of information on HIV epidemic and prevention efforts globally.
The organizers built in plenty of time for questions, which led to some great discussions. There was information about new medications in the pipeline for HIV prevention, which brings excitement for us to provide patients with better options. For example, injectable PrEP once every six months for MSM and transgender women, and a once-a-month oral option, islatravir, for cisgender women and transgender women.
Other topics that were interesting included PrEP with gender-affirming hormone and peer navigation for transgender women (HPTN 091), interaction between oral contraceptive and long-acting (LA) PrEP and long-acting PrEP in public health clinics.
Tell us about your presentations.
Dr. Doblecki-Lewis: Dr. Mariano Kanamori, associate professor of public health sciences, studies using social networks to share information about HIV prevention. His lab organized a symposium on the different ways we can use social networks to address the HIV epidemic.
At the symposium, I spoke about a collaboration I have with Mariano. We have mobile HIV and STI (sexually transmitted infection) prevention and treatment clinics that go to five sites around the county. These are grant funded, so they are free for patients. We work with the health department to identify need and then visit those communities to provide these important services.
We have fantastic prevention strategies, but some people just can’t get to a regular clinic for multiple reasons. We’re always looking at how we can reach more people, so we came up with a social network strategy, which we developed with Mariano’s group.
We recruit people who are already taking PrEP and are interested in distributing HIV self-test kits and information about PrEP through their social networks. We found that people recognize the importance of community engagement and bringing these services to the people they know. Many have friends who are nervous about getting tested, and they can actually help them directly.
We found in our pilot studies that 70% of the people who distributed the kits said they also talked about PrEP. This is important because receiving this information from someone you know and trust can have high impact.
Dr. Beauchamps: I was honored to participate in an exceptional panel led by one of my mentors, Dr. Mariano Kanamori. Both he and Dr. Doblecki-Lewis have guided my research on studying transgender women’s social networks and advance bundled PrEP and gender-affirming hormone treatment knowledge and uptake in Black and Latina transgender women.
Many of the communities we are working with are difficult to reach, so we’re testing new ways to disseminate information about our programs. From my first EHE (Ending the HIV Epidemic) supplement grant, PrEPGAT, we identified the barriers, facilitators and determinants to PrEP in this population. We have strong collaboration with community partners to ensure our efforts resonate with these clients.
We aim to measure the reach of our short, informational video on PrEP as an attractive way to obtain that in a one-stop shop. The social networks are incredibly important to create implementation science that will impact this community. As we have seen in our PrEPGAT results, we could identify seeds and alters that we could concentrate efforts in to increase dissemination of information.
Tags: Division of Infectious Diseases, Dr. Susanne Doblecki-Lewis, HIV, HIV PrEP, HIV prevention, Infectious diseases, Laura Beauchamps, Rapid Access Wellness Clinic