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News from HIV Research for Prevention 2016 (HIVR4P)
The collaborative effort to develop and deliver new HIV prevention approaches is surging forward. HIV Research for Prevention (HIVR4P 2016) is the only global scientific conference that looks at all forms of biomedical HIV prevention together—through abstract-driven research sessions; plenaries by leading researchers, policy makers and advocates; crosscutting sessions; meet the expert sessions; and networking opportunities. Plan now to join us in Chicago 17-21 October for HIVR4P 2016!
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DON'T MISS THE DEADLINE: ABSTRACTS AND SCHOLARSHIPS
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Monday, 11 April is the deadline to submit your research abstracts for HIVR4P 2016. Abstracts are being accepted in 28 categories—from Antibody Functions (neutralizing and non-neutralizing) to Ethics in HIV Prevention Research, and Therapy as Prevention—with more than two-dozen research categories in between. HIVR4P is a research-driven meeting, so join the conversation by submitting your abstract today.
11 April is also the deadline for conference scholarship applications. HIVR4P is dedicated to ensuring the participation of researchers, community activists, and civil society representatives, especially those from resource-limited settings and communities, at this unique global meeting. We support that commitment by awarding more than 300 scholarships for researchers, community representatives, and new investigators to attend, present at, and participate in HIVR4P.
Research scholarships are open to graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, or junior faculty within two years of faculty appointment who are actively involved in HIV prevention research. HIVR4P also provides five New Investigator Awards to graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, or junior faculty who are presenting authors of accepted abstracts at the conference.
Community scholarships are open to individuals who are actively involved in HIV prevention or care as community advocates, educators, care providers, program managers, or related roles, and who are able to effectively communicate knowledge gained at the conference to the communities they represent.
These scholarships are highly competitive and the time is to apply is limited. All applicants must complete and submit the online scholarship application by 24:00 UTC Monday, 11 April 2016.
HIVR4P also operates a journalist fellowship and training program for reporters who play key roles in translating HIV prevention research news to communities heavily impacted by the epidemic. Applications for the journalist fellowship program open 4 April. Watch for details in the next edition of this newsletter.
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HIVR4P is the world’s premier conference on biomedical HIV prevention, and the demand for satellite programs is high. So HIVR4P offers two days of satellites. Pre-conference satellites run Monday, 17 October from 09.00–15.00, and post-conference satellites will be held on Friday, 21 October from 09.00–12.00.
Post-conference satellites offer an excellent opportunity to digest the findings from HIVR4P and incorporate updates from the conference into satellite discussions. Applications for HIVR4P satellites are being accepted now through 29 April. Learn more here.
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MEET HIVR4P CO-CHAIR NELLY MUGO
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 HIVR4P 2016 co-chair Dr. Nelly R. Mugo is an obstetrician and gynecologist, and a principal research scientist at the Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI) in Nairobi, Kenya. She has been a site investigator for multi-site HIV prevention clinical trials including the HSV-HIV Transmission study and the Partners PrEP study. We sat down with Dr. Mugo to get her perspective on HIV prevention research, the intersection of HIV and sexual and reproductive health and, of course, on planning for HIVR4P.
What excites you most about HIV prevention these days?
A lot of my work has been on PrEP. We’ve been searching for many years for female-controlled prevention, and PrEP could be an important step forward for women. Now, we’re at the point of scaling up PrEP, and making it real, which is very exciting. Delivery is the next challenge we face. It’s not as easy as, say, delivering a hypertensive drug.
Then of course, there’s the recent news about rings. Ten years back we had nothing for women. Now we have options—we just need to figure out how to make them available, and support women to use them. We’ve struggled through trials where the women in the study, especially the youngest women, didn’t use the products. And the most recent data from the ring study also shows poor adherence among women younger than 21, who also have very high HIV incidence. But there is a sense that, now that we know these products work, women may use them more consistently.
I am also very interested in DREAMS (a 10-country partnership of PEPFAR, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Girl Effect to reduce HIV in adolescent girls and young women). This is part of a global movement to crush this epidemic in girls. That intensity of focus makes a world of difference. We will hear a lot about new approaches to addressing the epidemic in women and girls at HIVR4P.
Your background is in reproductive health. How do reproductive health and HIV prevention intersect?
I see HIV prevention and reproductive health as part of a movement for young women, where we also improve the uptake of contraceptives and work on the underlying issues that make women and girls vulnerable to both HIV and to unintended pregnancy. You get both the same way and the vulnerabilities are tied in together.
There is a great deal of discussion about female-controlled prevention. Are we also focusing enough on the role of partners, families, and communities in helping women to stay HIV-free?
Women do not live in a cocoon. To understand women and girls, we need to understand all the factors that make young women vulnerable to HIV and unintended pregnancy, together, including the social and cultural vulnerabilities and the demands and expectations placed on girls. Why does a society tolerate an old man marrying a young girl or buying her gifts? Or encourage girls to have babies before they can even decide what they want to do with their lives? These social norms need to be reset, as part of the effort to stop HIV.
Part of what DREAMS is looking at is keeping girls in school. In studies that looked at all types of vulnerabilities to HIV and pregnancy, the one factor that stood out was education. So when we talk about combination prevention, supporting education is part of the combination.
These issues will be an important part of the HIVR4P program. We have been careful in developing the program to address issues beyond the purely biomedical approaches to prevention. Behavioral issues matter as well. We can develop a vaccine, for example, but can we help people take it up? The experience with the HPV vaccine shows that those issues are just as important to prevention success as the biomedical questions.
You are asked to contribute to a lot of meetings. Why did you agree to co-chair HIVR4P 2016?
Well, it is a big commitment, but it’s also an honor to co-chair HIVR4P. I believe in this conference, and I believe that HIVR4P takes the right approach to prevention. That is, that we need to look at all of the technologies and implementation and behavioral issues together. So I really support the thinking behind this conference. I think it’s an essential meeting for anyone working to take HIV prevention forward.
What is the conference doing to ensure global participation in the meeting?
HIVR4P has a real commitment, not only to ensuring that researchers and advocates from resource-poor settings are present at the meeting, but also to ensuring that their voices and perspectives are highlighted. That’s essential, because we don't all think the same way. Viewpoints are different, strengths are different, and everybody’s voice needs to be heard.
That commitment starts with the conference Program Organizing Committee, which was developed to be a true global representation of people working in this field. Every programming decision that the committee makes, from the plenaries to each breakout session, seeks to achieve that global balance of perspectives. Then there is the conference scholarship program, which will provide 300 scholarships to researchers, advocates, and journalists from resource-poor countries. Those are essential to making sure that the meeting reflects global perspectives, and to ensuring that what we learn at HIVR4P gets back out into the communities, where the theory of HIV prevention becomes reality.
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MOVING PREVENTION FORWARD
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Many of the leaders in the field have just returned from the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) in Boston, where data on the dapivirine vaginal ring for HIV prevention, long-acting injectable HIV prevention, PrEP implementation efforts and new approaches to preventing HIV in children made global headlines.
HIVR4P is the place to build on each of these developments as we take the field farther into the future of HIV prevention. Make your plans to join us at HIVR4P 2016 today!
Early bird registration rates are available now. Register to attend HIVR4P 2016 here.
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Partnering for Prevention is the theme of HIVR4P 2016. HIVR4P funding partners help keep conference registration fees low, support conference scholarships for more than 300 promising early career researchers, support diverse educational programming at HIVR4P, and much more. To learn more about sponsorship opportunities, please visit our sponsor resource page.
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Don't miss updates from HIVR4P
There has never been a more dynamic, exciting, or challenging time in HIV prevention research than now. Keep on top of the news and receive planning updates from HIVR4P 2016 by signing up below at Mail Chimp or here.
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