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SCHS Professor Awarded $3.3M NIH Grant for HIV Transmission Prevention in Nigeria | Research and Economic Development | University of Nevada, Las Vegas

SCHS Professor Awarded $3.3M NIH Grant for HIV Transmission Prevention in Nigeria | Research and Economic Development | University of Nevada, Las Vegas





The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded a five-year, $3.3 million grant to Dr. Echezona Ezeanolue, professor and director of the UNLV School of Community Health Sciences’ Global Public Health and Implementation Science Initiative, for his Intervention for Sustained Testing and Retention (iSTAR) project.
iSTAR is an integrated community- and clinic-based intervention that is designed to test, link, engage, and sustain HIV-infected women in care. The primary goal of the cluster randomized comparative effectiveness trial project is to assess the difference in linkage and engagement rates between iSTAR and the clinic-based approach (CG). The project also seeks to assess differences in retention and viral suppression rates.
“We are hoping to reduce HIV treatment dropout, increase retention, and reduce mother-to-child transmission,” said Dr. Ezeanolue, who is also the lead investigator for the project. “50,000 children are infected with HIV each year. Our goal is to drop that number.”
Dr. Ezeanolue, his team at the Global Public Health and Implementation Science Initiative, and grant partners will assess 400 HIV-infected women, using social-network intervention methods to facilitate implementation and determine implementation leadership and context. Fifty churches in the “South South Zone” of Nigeria will be randomly assigned to iSTAR or CG.
The iSTAR intervention will provide:
  • Confidential, on-site integrated laboratory testing during baby showers,
  • A network of church-based health advisors,
  • Clinic-based teams trained in motivational interviewing,
  • Quality-improvement skills to engage and support HIV-infected women, and
  • Integrated case management to reduce loss to follow-up.
Dr. Ezeanolue will leverage the infrastructures within the UNLV Global Public Health and Implementation Science Initiative—which facilitates multidisciplinary collaboration among UNLV faculty, students, and public health experts to reduce health disparity across the globe—to support the project work. In addition to facilitating research into HIV prevention, the iSTAR grant will also offer opportunities for UNLV faculty and students to research hypertension, diabetes, and breast cancer.
“What this grant means for us as an institution is the opportunity for people to build into it and create their projects without having to get the full funding themselves,” Dr. Ezeanolue said. “We are hiring 120 people in Nigeria to work on this grant. This infrastructure on the ground provides an opportunity for faculty to put in pilots that would have cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars for only the cost of hemoglobin testing.”
The iSTAR program is a collaboration among the University of Nigeria; University of Southern California; University of California, San Diego; University of Illinois at Chicago; Nevada State College; and University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Alongside Dr. Ezeanolue, Dr. Chima Onoka of the University of Nigeria will serve as an additional principal investigator for the grant.
This study is supported by the NIH’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development.
For more information about UNLV’s Global Public Health and Implementation Science Initiative, visit www.unlv.edu/publichealth/centers-labs.


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