Marcus To Give ODP Early Stage Investigator Talk, Nov. 17

NIH’s Office of Disease Prevention will host the 2020 ODP Early-Stage Investigator Lecture “Scaling Up HIV Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis to End the HIV Epidemic,” by Dr. Julia Marcus. This virtual lecture will take place on Tuesday, Nov. 17 at 11 a.m. The event is open to the public and there will be an opportunity to ask questions at the end of the presentation. 

Daily oral HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, is up to 99 percent effective in preventing HIV transmission and has been FDA-approved since 2012. However, of the 1.2 million Americans who could benefit from PrEP, less than 20 percent have used it, and there are substantial racial and ethnic disparities in uptake. 

Scale-up of PrEP is a critical component of the federal initiative to end the HIV epidemic, but achieving this goal will require effective strategies to improve PrEP implementation. 

In this ODP presentation, Marcus will discuss her research on strategies to improve PrEP uptake, including the use of electronic health records to help health care providers identify patients who may benefit from PrEP.

Marcus is an infectious disease epidemiologist and associate professor in the department of population medicine at Harvard Medical School and Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute, as well as adjunct faculty at the Fenway Institute. Her research focuses on HIV, hepatitis C and other sexually transmitted infections, with a primary interest in the implementation of PrEP for HIV prevention. 

Her studies have leveraged data from electronic health records to identify patients who may benefit from PrEP, to characterize PrEP uptake and continuation and to document clinical outcomes among PrEP users in real-world health care settings. 

Marcus’s work has been funded by several institutes, including NIAID, NIMH and NIMHD.

To register, visit https://prevention.nih.gov/news-events/early-stage-investigator-lecture/2020-awardee. The lecture will be recorded and available on the ODP website within a week.