Funding Opportunity Number: PAS-23-173
Deadlines: September 7, 2024, January 7, 2025
Description
The NOFO seeks to expand the HIV/AIDS prevention toolkit among alcohol impacted populations with a range of patterns of episodic and long-term use and associated behavioral and biological risks for HIV acquisition. This includes integration of effective prevention and treatment interventions with an understanding of the overarching framework for reducing the incidence of new infections by facilitating cross-cutting informative research. This research activity includes the development and testing of new interventions and expansion of existing effective interventions as well as the implementation of these integrative preventive activities in diverse settings and populations. Six areas of research are of primary interest related to alcohol use and related mental health and substance use comorbidities. These include but are not limited to 1) PrEP Utilization, 2) Treatment as Prevention (TasP), 3) Integration of Preventive Intervention Strategies, 4) Prevention-related Cross-cutting Research, 5) Syndemic Approaches and, 6) Implementation and Operations Research.
Applications submitted in response to this NOFO are encouraged to focus on one or more of the several highest risk groups for alcohol-related HIV/AIDS acquisition/transmission; e.g., men who have sex with men (MSM; especially younger MSM of color); transgendered individuals; commercial sex workers; HIV-serodiscordant couples; women with high-risk partners, including pregnant women living with HIV and their children; people who are inconsistently using HIV prophylaxis; victims of trauma and violence; individuals newly-released from incarceration; and residents of HIV/AIDS epicenters in low-resourced settings. In addition, this NOFO encourages research that is congruent with the NIH and CDC’s goal of reducing HIV incidence among residents geographically located in HIV/AIDS “hot spots” in the US, such as the US South, which includes 38 percent of the US population but more than 50 percent of new HIV diagnoses in 2017. This recommendation is consistent with the “Ending the Epidemic” (EHE) strategic plan supported by other federal agencies and offices.
Furthermore, investigators should strive to create new communication strategies and incorporate new technological approaches (e.g., through venues, networks, service delivery systems) to recruit, enroll, and retain high risk groups who are difficult to reach by other means. Applications submitted in response to this NOFO should seek to incorporate innovative, state-of-the-art measurement and analytic approaches in the conduct of all elements of the basic behavioral/biobehavioral and intervention research components; e.g., biomarkers for alcohol use, passive alcohol sensors, self-monitoring of alcohol consumption and medication adherence, virtual reality approaches to systematically measure dynamics in behavioral interventions, and agent-based modeling. Recent technological developments that have made possible the collection of real-time reporting of drinking episodes and critical details on alcohol use patterns (for instance, type of alcohol, size of serving, number of servings, time of day, duration of use, and drinking location) as well as triggering social contexts, and the development of so-called mobile health (*mHealth*) interventions, open up new doors of possibility for HIV prevention intervention delivery and should be strongly considered for incorporation. Pragmatic trials and trials that utilize adaptive designs are also strongly encouraged.
For more information, please see the opportunity webpage.