The National Institute on Drug Abuse has awarded UCLA a $7 million grant to investigate the links between substance abuse and HIV among Latino and African-American men who have sex with men.
Pamina Gorbach, a professor of epidemiology at UCLA Fielding School of Public Health and a professor of infectious diseases at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, and Steven Shoptaw, a professor of family medicine at the Geffen School and director of the UCLA Center for Behavioral and Addiction Medicine, will lead the study. Dr. Peter Aton, a professor of digestive diseases at the Geffen School, will establish and maintain an extensive catalogue of blood, tisue and fluid samples for the study.
"This cohort is central to prevention and treatment efforts and will provide well-characterized, extensive repository samples for leveraged use with other cohorts, networks and individual's studies," Shoptaw said. "This unique cohort will facilitate studies on interactions between substance use and HIV progression and transmission, which are of critical public health significance."
The studied, titled MASCULINE (MSM and Substances Cohort at UCLA Linking Infections Noting Effects), is a companion study to the Fielding School's Behavioral Epidemiology Research Group's Multisite AIDS Cohort Study, the first and largest study specifically created to examine the natural history of AIDS.
