The chief of pediatric infectious diseases at the UF College of Medicine-Jacksonville recently received $5 million from the National Institutes of Health to fund an international group focused on studying HIV/AIDS.

The money will go toward the International Maternal Pediatric Adolescent AIDS Clinical Trials network, a cooperative group of institutions, investigators and other collaborators organized to evaluate potential therapies for HIV infection and the various medical conditions it can cause in infants, children, adolescents and pregnant women, said Mobeen Rathore, M.D.

"What’s really exciting is that we’re participating in such a huge international effort, all under the auspices of the NIH," Rathore said. "We’ll have direct access to a network that is probably the only ‘place’ for international collaboration that includes not only the U.S. but also Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, North America and South America."

Researchers at these institutions will conduct various clinical trials for HIV-infected children, adolescents and women, said Rathore, principal investigator for UF’s part of the study. The goal of the multiple studies is to understand various aspects of pediatric, adolescent and perinatal HIV/AIDS.

"Directives will come from the National Institutes of Health, which will develop a road map for the studies from which we, as a cooperative group of various international institutions and programs, will develop research initiatives," he said. "We could study various and sundry things about HIV/AIDS — new drugs, new vaccines, complications, mental health, drug side effects, how to deal with the complications those living with the disease experience."

The network’s international emphasis and mission is a first in the study of HIV/AIDS.

Rathore hopes these studies will shed light on how HIV/AIDS affects adolescents, thanks to the new grant.

"There’s a lot of work to be done on adolescents because their issues are different," he said. "They’re getting pregnant and being infected behaviorally — issues that the new grant will allow us investigate and learn more about."