Group head | |
Name: | Theresa Rossouw |
E-mail: | [email protected] |
Telephone: | 012 319 2626 |
A brief description of research activities:
Our group works in three main, interrelated and complementary research areas: the clinical and basic science aspects of Human Immunodeficiency Virus-1 (HIV) infection; HIV-associated comorbidities; and the socio-ethical aspects of biomedical research, especially HIV-related research. Our main focus has been on understanding the drivers of disease progression and treatment failure. We have assessed the nature and frequency of HIV-1-associated drug resistance mutations in adult patients failing treatment using an in-house genotypic drug resistance assay and showed very high levels of drug resistance in patients failing first-line ART. This work also extended to the paediatric population where we evaluated the effect of peripartum ART on the efficacy of subsequent ART in children, specifically with regards to the consequent development of HIV-1-associated drug resistance and treatment failure, in collaboration with the University of Washington, Seattle, USA. Coupled with this work, we have also been involved in assessing public health-level early warning indicators for drug resistance in settings where resistance testing is not readily available. This resistance work has been presented at a number of national and international conferences, including the preeminent international HIV conference, the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI), and has been published in both the clinical science and public health fields, including a letter in Nature and articles in AIDS, Pediatric Infectious Diseases, Database, BMC Health Services Research, as well as an invited editorial in Clinical Infectious Diseases, one of the leading journals in the field of infectious disease.
The problem of HIV-associated chronic, systemic immune activation as a driver of both the development of HIV treatment failure and drug resistance as well as non-AIDS-defining chronic conditions have become the focus of our HIV research in the last six years. We have identified a set of circulating biomarkers of immune activation which may be predictive of responses to ART. We have explored the clinical implications of such immune activation in both adult and paediatric populations and four articles have been in high-quality journals, such as Mediators of Inflammation. This work has also served as the impetus for a large study in collaboration with the international PharmaAccess Studies to Evaluate Resistance (PASER) network, where we assessed associations between chronic immune activation and different ART regimens, geographic regions and HIV subtypes. We found significant differences and these findings have been presented at CROI and a number of articles have been submitted for publication. We recently turned to explore whether systemic immune activation may also lie at the heart of the immunological and metabolic aberrations found in HIV-exposed-but-uninfected children and I am currently heading the laboratory work for a large international study aimed at understanding the clinical, immunological and metabolic consequences of ART exposure in-utero. Worrisomely, these children have also been shown to have delayed neurodevelopment and the pilot study demonstrated associations between macrophage activation profiles and smaller head circumference and have been presented at a number of international and national conferences.
The group’s basic science and clinical research efforts have been reinforced by a social science dimension. I am specifically interested in the quality of informed consent obtained in medical research in general and in HIV research in particular. I have been involved in collaborative research on the future use of biological samples (that is especially important in the emerging era of biobanking) and the implications this holds for the kind of information included in informed consent documents. This work has been published in an international biomedical journal. Based on this work, I have been invited to become part of an international working group looking at the ethical and social implications of HIV cure research. This collaboration brings together researchers from South Africa, the United States of America and China and is viewed as pioneering work in the field since it represents one of the few instances where the ethics is preceding the science. We explored diverse issues such as the implications of the use of the word "cure" when only remission will most likely be achieved (published in the preeminent journal, AIDS). We have also conducted interviews with a diverse group of patients, researchers, clinicians, activists and policymakers to explore which informed consent processes need to be in place for such research to be ethically accountable. Our findings have been published in major ethics journals and more articles are being completed.
Current group members (incl. group head):
Name | Position | Qualification(s) | e-mail address |
Theresa Rossouw | Associate Professor, Immunology | MBChB, MPhil, MPH, DPhil, PhD | [email protected] |
Helen Steel | Senior scientist | BSc, MSc, PhD | [email protected] |
PG Students | |||
Gisela van Dyk | PhD student | BSc, MSc | [email protected] |
Temitope Sokoya | PhD student | BSc, MSc | [email protected] |
Louise du Toit | PhD student | BSc, MSc | [email protected] |
Andrea Prinsloo | PhD student | BSc, MSc | [email protected] |
Morris Madzime | PhD student | BSc, MSc | [email protected] |
Sanele Ngcobo | PhD student | BMCP, MPH | [email protected] |
Karmishtha Hutheram | PhD student | BSc, MSc | [email protected] |
Bong-Akee Shey | PhD student | BSc, MSc | [email protected] |
Mieke van der Mescht | MSc student | BSc Honours | [email protected] |
Difuro Masemola | MFamMed student | MBChB | [email protected] |
Gbenga Ogundana | MFamMed student | MBChB | [email protected] |
Post-graduate students graduated in the past 5 years:
Name of student | Degree | Date of qualification |
G Makubele | MSc Immunology | 2014 |
Dr JM Mabena | MMed Fam Med | 2016 |
Dr N Akerele | MMed Fam Med | 2016 |
Dr B Maphosa | MPH | 2017 |
Dr B Ndhlovu | MPH | 2018 |
Ms TO Sokoya | PhD Medical Immunology | 2018 |
Collaborator | ||
Mr G Malherbe | PhD Medical Immunology | 2015 |
Mr P Mahasha | PhD Medical Immunology | 2015 |
National and international collaborations:
National:
International:
Media articles/interviews/etc.:
Awards/distinctions of the past 5 years:
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