Renewed funding for Aweeka study on malaria treatment for children with HIV in Africa

Fran Aweeka, PharmD, will receive renewed funding for her grant from the National Institutes of Health for evaluating the pharmacology of antimalarial drugs in children in Africa. This is a renewal of her R01 on this important work, and will provide five years of funding for Aweeka and her colleagues at Yale and in Uganda.

The purpose of the grant is to investigate the pharmacology and clinical response of optimized dosing regimens for the most common antimalarial drugs used for treatment of malaria in HIV infected children in Uganda (artemether-lumefantrine). In addition, important drug interactions between antiretroviral drugs and the most common antimalarial drugs used for chemoprevention (dihydroartemisinin-piperaquine) will be studied.

Aweeka and her colleagues have found that “selection of antiretroviral therapy has a highly significant impact on antimalarial exposure and clinical outcomes.” They published their findings in August, as cited below.

Journal Citation: Parikh S, Kajubi R, Huang L, Ssebuliba J, Kiconco S, Gao Q, Li F, Were M, Kakuru A, Achan J, Mwebaza N, Aweeka FT, “Antiretroviral choice for HIV impacts antimalarial exposure and treatment outcomes for Ugandan children,” Clinical Infectious Diseases, Aug. 1, 2016, doi: 10.1093/cid/ciw291

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Aweeka study details impact of HIV drugs on malaria treatment in children