Completed Public Health & Healthcare Infection & Immunity

Harmonisation and sharing of linked HIV cohort data from communities and clinics in Africa

Funder Wellcome Charity-funded
Recipient organisation London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
Funding £1.3M
Period Dec 2016 — Nov 2020

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

HIV clinics and community health surveys across Africa are pooling their data into a single, standardised resource that tracks every person from infection through to successful treatment. The problem is that two major HIV research networks—ALPHA, which surveys entire communities, and IeDEA, which follows patients in clinics—have long operated separately. This means data on the same person can exist in both systems but cannot be easily combined. Without linked data, researchers cannot reliably measure whether countries are meeting the UNAIDS 90-90-90 targets: 90% of people with HIV knowing their status, 90% of those on treatment, and 90% of those virally suppressed. If this project succeeds, it will produce the first robust, population-based view of the entire HIV care continuum in Africa—from undiagnosed infection to long-term viral suppression. That will let governments and health agencies see exactly where the gaps are, whether in testing, treatment access, or adherence. The resource will also automate data harmonisation and make pooled datasets publicly available, so other researchers can reuse them without starting from scratch. This is infrastructure work: it does not discover a new drug, but it makes every future study of HIV in Africa more powerful and more reliable.

View original technical description
The new data resource will bridge population-based HIV surveillance in the network for Analysing Longitudinal Population-based HIV data in Africa (ALPHA) and clinical monitoring in the network for International Epidemiologic Databases to Evaluate AIDS (IeDEA), ensuring that data on people who participate in both ALPHA and IeDEA cohorts is exchangable and shared across the two networks. HIV clinics serving ALPHA sites but not currently part of IeDEA will be supported to attain data management standards required for IeDEA membership, using the international standard HIV Cohort Data Exchange Protocol (HICDEP) to ensure global data comparability. The resource will provide robust, population-based data for all stages of the HIV care continuum from infection to viral suppression, enabling empirical monitoring of all three UNAIDS 90-90-90 goals, which neither network can do independently. It will automate and document the creation of standardised analytical datasets, extending the Centre-in-a-box methodology pioneered by the INDEPTH network. Data integration software will build and document transformations for compiling each site’s data into harmonised formats required for pooled datasets. Key summary statistical updates will be disseminated regularly through ALPHA web pages. Pooled datasets will be archived in the INDEPTH "iShare" public repository using the Data Documentation Initiative standard.

View the original record at the funder ↗

Researchers

Basia Zaba (EPMC Awardee)

Related Research

Grants with similar aims, by meaning.

ALPHA: Collaborative network for data analysis in African community-based, longitudinal HIV studies.
Implementation Network for Sharing Population Information from Research Entities in East Africa (INSPIRE-EA)
Strengthening Institutional Networks and Building Capacity for Epidemiological Preparedness in Africa (SINCEP-Africa)
Informing global efforts to improve the health and wellbeing of low and middle-income populations: The INDEPTH Network of Health and Demographic Surveillance Systems.
Wellcome Centre for Infectious Diseases Research in Africa Discovery Platforms in Science

Original classification

Biomedical Resources Grant

Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.