ERC Einstein Rockefeller CUNY Center for AIDS Research

PROJECT SUMMARY
ERC-CFAR: CLINICAL AND TRANSLATIONAL SCIENCE CORE (CTSC)
To help meet the vision of Ending the HIV Epidemic (EHE), the Einstein-Rockefeller-CUNY Center for AIDS
Research (ERC-CFAR) has formed strong collaborations both within and beyond our partner institutions,
including the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, to catalyze and support research that
best serves the public’s health: to eradicate HIV infection, prevent new HIV infections, and improve the health
of people living with HIV (PWH). The overarching goal of the ERC-CFAR and the Clinical and Translational
Science Core (CTSC) is to support the EHE mission by creating a broad and robust resource available to
researchers within our walls as well as nationally and globally. Our synergistic partnership provides a broad
range of support for clinical, translational, health services, and implementation science investigations. By
leveraging the resources of the Einstein CTSA-funded Institute for Clinical and Translational Research, the
CTSC provides access to a robust clinical database and multiple biorepositories. The Clinical Cohort Database
(CCDB), derived from the Montefiore/Einstein clinical services, has ~20,000 PWH and 475,000 HIV-negative
patients; >6200 PWH are in active care; 43% are women, 48% Hispanic/Latinx and 41% African American. This
comprehensive, longitudinal database accesses Montefiore’s extensive clinical infrastructure and has fostered
an explosion of clinical prevention and treatment, epidemiologic, translational, health services and
implementation science research. We facilitate enrollment of well-characterized patients (including HIV-negative
controls) into new research protocols. Through CTSC resources the clinical population at Montefiore/Einstein
enables research at Rockefeller, which lacks access to defined cohorts of PWH, recruiting new participants for
Rockefeller’s cutting-edge research in HIV eradication. The City University of New York (CUNY) is a leader in
implementation science assessing the factors that influence our ability to impact favorably on the public’s health
with interventions of proven efficacy. The CTSC is integrated into the Scientific Working Group, a driver of the
ERC-CFAR’s scientific direction, to provide optimal support to the emerging research activities, and foster cross-
fertilization among cores and the SWG. We will leverage Einstein’s Center for Health Data Innovations and use
of state-of-the-art informatics methods, including natural language processing and machine learning, to catalyze
and facilitate new research in primary prevention of HIV infection, while maintaining our extensive support of
well-established research areas.

Grant Number: 5P30AI124414-10
NIH Institute/Center: NIH
Principal Investigator: Kathryn Anastos