“SEARCH SAPPHIRE”—A Multi-sectoral Strategy to Address Primary and Persistent drivers of the HIV epidemic in Rural East Africa.
Study period:Ongoing.
Funded by NIH, SAPPHIRE was designed to conduct population-level research to evaluate strategies to deliver HIV prevention and treatment better to all persons in need and leverage the HIV care system for other chronic diseases to further reduce HIV incidence and improve health. Overall, SAPPHIRE aims to determine how to reduce HIV incidence to below 0.1% using innovative strategies for HIV prevention and treatment to simultaneously reach “persistent driver” populations with scalable interventions.
Over a 5-year period (phase A 2-years and phase B 3-years), an estimated 162,400 individual participants ≥15 years of age both the positive for HIV and those at risk of acquiring HIV living in 36 communities in rural western Kenya and rural western Uganda will be enrolled into SAPPHIRE trial.
- Phase A will have 7 individual-level randomized trials to assess effectiveness, fidelity and cost and improve context-specific “fit” of prevention and treatment interventions. Combining effectiveness with implementation, costing and modelling outcomes, Phase A will optimize intervention packages with context specific adaptations in structured consultation with stakeholders.
- Phase B, which will evaluate the effects of these optimized dynamic prevention and treatment packages, alone and in combination, on prevention coverage, population-level suppression, and HIV incidence, as well as other health outcomes, in a balanced, community randomized 2×2 factorial design.
Collaborators:
The study Principal Investigators are Professor Moses Kamya at Makerere University and IDRC, Uganda; Professor Maya Petersen at University of California, Berkeley, USA; and Professor Diane Havlir at UCSF, USA.
The project will be implemented by the Infectious Diseases Research Collaboration (IDRC), Makerere University in Uganda and KEMRI in Kenya alongside partners from the University of California, San Francisco Research Collaboration.
