A national AIDS research consortium led by UAB has two new university partners: The Centers for AIDS Research at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn. and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The nine-member consortium run by UAB’s Center for AIDS Research (CFAR) is called CFAR Network of Integrated Clinical Systems (CNICS).

“Adding the Vanderbilt and North Carolina centers deepens the network’s expertise and adds to our ever growing database of AIDS testing and research results,” said Michael Saag, M.D., director of UAB’s CFAR. “We’ve started a new paradigm for clinical investigation – a way to combine, expedite and improve real-time population-based studies vital to the fight against human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection.”

CNICS lets members combine secured data to track diagnosis and treatment outcomes, monitor hard-to-gather information like quality of life measurements and accurate medical histories, and links these data to a repository of clinical specimens.

CNICS serves as a one-of-a-kind research backbone for clinical, translational and basic science to address how HIV causes AIDS, HIV prevention and treatment advances.

“This type of network is the future of HIV/AIDS clinical research, and it serves as a model for clinical outcomes research and treatment monitoring for many other diseases,” Saag said. It started two years ago with funding from UAB and the National Institutes of Health.

The other consortium members are Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland; Harvard University in Boston; Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore; the University of California, San Diego; the University of California, San Francisco and the University of Washington in Seattle. It is expected more research sites will be added in the future. Information is available at www.cnics.net.