On Jul. 22, 2021, the National Institutes of Health announced it had renewed grants to seven regional centers that compose the International epidemiology Databases to Evaluate AIDS (IeDEA), awarding $20.8 million in first-year funding. The 15-year-old IeDEA program efficiently advances knowledge about HIV by pooling and analyzing de-identified health data from more than two million people with HIV on five continents to answer research questions that individual studies cannot address. The grants were expected to last five years and to total an estimated $100 million.

The IeDEA program addresses local, national and global questions about illness and death in people with HIV to accelerate progress toward ending the pandemic. The program also provides data to international partners such as the World Health Organization (WHO) to inform global health policy. In addition, IeDEA builds global health research infrastructure to help the next generation of scientists address questions important to their geographical regions. Finally, the program works to improve the quality of international health data by identifying gaps in both data and analytical methods and determining how to fill them. 

The new funding will enable the program to add a Sentinel Research Network (SRN) to prospectively collect cardiovascular, cancer, lung, metabolic, substance use and mental health data to characterize the sizeable impact of non-communicable diseases on people with HIV today. The SRN will consist of at least two HIV clinics per region that collect data on non-communicable diseases as well as on hepatitis, the level of HIV in the blood, and a patient’s level of immune health. These clinics will be located in low- and middle-income countries, where such information often is not gathered.