Subject: San Francisco: HIV drug study needs volunteers with dark hair

HIV drug study needs volunteers with dark hair

San Francisco Chronicle - November 5, 2009
Victoria Colliver, Chronicle Staff Writer

http://www.aegis.org/news/sc/2009/SC091101.html

Wanted: Dark-haired HIV-negative men and women to participate in a study designed to measure drug levels in hair.

It's called the "Strand Study" and it's part of a larger effort by AIDS scientists to look at whether people who are HIV-negative can benefit from prophylactically taking anti-HIV drugs to reduce their chances of infection.

Researchers from the San Francisco Department of Public Health and UCSF want to test people's hair to see if it could be used to measure how well people are complying with their drug regimen along with how efficiently the drug is metabolized by the body.

"Currently, we don't have a truly accurate measure of how well people are taking their medications and how well they process drugs," said Dr. Albert Liu, director of HIV Prevention Intervention Studies for San Francisco's Health Department. Blood measurements show the short-term presence of drugs, but do not capture the effect of a drug in the body's system over time, he said.

Liu said researchers intend to use the hair method as a tool when conducting drug studies to determine whether results are being affected by adherence to the prescribed therapy.

But why dark hair?

That's simply a matter of pigment. Drug molecules bind to the pigment in hair. Because dark hair has higher levels of pigment, the drug is more likely to bind, making it easier to measure. Liu said binding quality has no relation to drug absorption; light-haired people are not known to metabolize drugs any differently than their dark-haired counterparts.

The Strand Study, which is funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, requires volunteers to take various dosages of tenofovir, which is one of the drugs used in the global prophylactic studies. Liu said tenofovir has fewer side effects than other HIV drugs and a favorable safety profile.

Volunteers will be paid up to $1,300 to take three different dosing regimens of the drug, each lasting six weeks: one pill two times a week, four times a week and every day. Liu said the pill must be taken in the presence of the study researcher at UCSF or at the Van Ness offices of the Health Department.

The study also requires one 24-hour hospital stay, during which blood levels will be measured. "It's quite an involved study," Liu said.

Volunteers have already started enrolling and researchers hope to begin the study in the next couple of months. They are seeking just 24 people, and hope to have an equal mix of men and women, who are over 18 years old and are not pregnant or planning to get pregnant during the study.

The study

For more information about the study, go to www.helpfighthiv.org.

E-mail Victoria Colliver at vcolliver@sfchronicle.com.

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