HIV can be treated, but not every infection responds the same way. Treatment requires monitoring and testing, a practice that can become expensive for health care systems in the developing world. With a new grant from the National Institutes of Health, Brown University professors Joseph Hogan and Rami Kantor will lead an effort to develop data-driven techniques to improve the effectiveness of monitoring treatment and to maximize the benefits associated with using expensive diagnostic procedures. Hogan, professor of biostatistics in the School of Public Health, and Kantor, associate professor of medicine at the Warren Alpert Medical School, will combine their expertise to develop statistical methods, software, and laboratory technologies that use clinical data from patient records to improve HIV treatment monitoring decisions. Their work will develop strategies to optimize timing and frequency of costly diagnostic procedures such as drug resistance testing and new methods for ‘batch testing’ to reduce the number of laboratory assays needed to determine individual patient viral loads.
In addition to developing the statistical framework and theory for these ideas, Hogan and Kantor will create practical laboratory methods and protocols that can be tested, refined, and implemented in AMPATH, a comprehensive HIV care program based in Eldoret, Kenya, that sees more than 130,000 HIV-infected patients a year.
Brown University is a member of the AMPATH Consortium, whose 18 North American institutions collaborate with Moi University in Eldoret on HIV research, care, and training. Hogan is co-director of biostatistics and Kantor is research director of the Brown University-Kenya Program. He studies the effectiveness of HIV treatment and its relationship to drug resistance.
Hogan said the project, supported with $3.5 million over five years, could demonstrate how more sophisticated use of data can improve medical care.
