MLW hosted the first large-scale population-based HIV self-testing study globally, defining and evaluating a semi-supervised volunteer distribution model that is now recommended by WHO and UNAIDS as safe, accurate, highly scalable and associated with increased demand for ART. Regional scale up through a large implementation research grant from UNITAID ($46 million) is now supporting interdisciplinary research accompanying 2.7 million HIV self-tests in Southern Africa, including Malawi.
Mwandumba’s lab has developed novel approaches to detecting HIV infection at single cell level, allowing isolation of high quality nu-cleic acids from pure populations of HIV-infected cells and detection of unique compartmental reservoirs, and enabling novel study of HIV clearance from different body compartments.
(PIs: Corbett, Desmond, Mwandumba, Jambo)