First HIV/AIDS
collaborative electronic database to be created

Last Tuesday seven U.S. medical centers announced that a federal grant will help them build the first collaborative electronic database for HIV/AIDS treatment results in hopes of determining the effectiveness of therapies and treatments for HIV-positive people, The New York Times reported.

The database project will be based at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and will be linked to Harvard University; Johns Hopkins University; University of Washington; University of California, San Diego; University of California, San Francisco; and Case Western Reserve University.

Through the program HIV-positive people will be asked to answer questions about symptoms, medication adherence, and other topics. Physicians will validate the information by asking participants about their answers and collecting blood samples. The project will keep confidential the identities of the 15,000 HIV-positive people in the program, the Times reports.

Each institution already has HIV/AIDS databases with the results of clinical trials for new treatments, and this project will link all of the databases together to help doctors and researchers compare the effectiveness of commonly used treatments with the clinical trial results for new treatments. (The Advocate)