ACTG researcher Dr. Aadia Rana is Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Alabama-Birmingham and an Investigator with the Alabama CRS. Aadia’s ACTG career began in 2010 when she started working as a site investigator at The Miriam Hospital CRS under Dr. Karen Tashima. Concurrent with her NIH-funded research, which addressed the need to improve care for and treatment adherence among people living with HIV, Aadia focused on developing strategies to promote recruitment, retention, and adherence in populations poorly represented in research studies as a member of the ACTG Underrepresented Populations Committee (2012-2016). In 2015, she also joined the Long-Acting Therapy Working Group of the ARTS and the Hard-to-Reach Populations Working Group.
Through these groups, Dr. Rana and Dr. Jose Castillo-Mancilla submitted a proposal in 2016 to compare the use of long-acting injectable antiretroviral therapy versus standard of care in individuals with a history of non-adherence to care and treatment. This proposal developed into A5359, Long-Acting Therapy to Improve Treatment SUccess in Daily LifE, A Phase III Study to Evaluate Long-Acting Antiretroviral Therapy in Non-adherent HIV-Infected Individuals (LATITUDE), which started enrolling participants in May 2019. LATITUDE tests a combination novel therapeutic strategy of injectable ART supported by short-term conditional economic incentives to improve outcomes in a challenging population. In 2017, Aadia Rana moved to UAB, where she co-directs the Ending HIV in Alabama Scientific Working group at the UAB Center for AIDS Research and became an Investigator with the ARTS.