Winter 2002-2003 Public Health Magazine: CFAR

CFAR: Emory's leading weapon in the war on AIDS

Stamping out AIDS will require new ideas and novel approaches. The Rollins School of Public Health (RSPH) provides a prime environment for such innovation.

Emory University first gained designation as a National Institutes of Health Center for AIDS Research (CFAR) in 1998, with a $2.3 million grant. Emory’s CFAR status was recently renewed for another five years, bringing with it $7.5 million from the NIH and $1.8 million from Emory University.

CFAR stimulates collaborations across the Emory campus, among the disciplines of public health, medicine, statistics, virology, pharmacology, and immunology, as well as partnerships with government agencies and private AIDS researchers and clinicians.

“The structure of CFAR encourages a cross- fertilization of ideas and relationships,” says Ralph DiClemente, the center’s associate director for prevention sciences. “It also provides the statistical and clinical support to take ideas from inception to actualization.”

Major CFAR components include RSPH and Emory’s School of Medicine, Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Vaccine Research Center, and the Hope Clinic for vaccine testing. Grady Health Systems’ Ponce de Leon Center, the Atlanta Veterans Affairs Medical Center, and Morehouse School of Medicine are also active participants.

Many studies that germinated in these collaborations have gone on to attract funding from other sources. “It’s no coincidence that before CFAR, we had $17 million in AIDS research grants, and we now have $45 million,” says Dean James Curran, CFAR director and principal investigator. Concurrent with this growth in resources, RSPH has built a strong core of behavioral scientists active in AIDS prevention research.
“We went from having a few stars in HIV/AIDS to one of the largest concentrations in the country just in the past five years,” says Kimberly Sessions, assistant administrative director of CFAR. “If you want to see what’s happening in cutting-edge AIDS research, just look at what’s happening at Emory.

Dean James Curran is director of the Emory CFAR and chair-elect of the directors committee for all NIH CFARs nationwide.