Caribbean, Central, and South America network for HIV Epidemiology (CCASAnet)
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The Caribbean, Central and South America network for HIV epidemiology (CCASAnet) is an established and productive network within the International epidemiology Databases to Evaluate AIDS (leDEA) program. CCASAnet was created in 2006 during the first leDEA funding cycle and has brought together clinical, statistical, epidemiologic, and informatics resources from HIV clinical care and research sites in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, and Peru, along with a coordinating center in Nashville, USA. Together, the members of the CCASAnet collaboration respond to scientific opportunities arising in the region and across HIV research networks worldwide. The CCASAnet Data Coordinating Center at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VDCC) manages the CCASAnet consortium and works to harmonize and analyze the complex databases generated by participating sites. The VDCC also provides mentoring and education to enhance clinical research and data management capabilities at CCASAnet sites, promote junior researchers, and catalyze ongoing growth of scientific leadership in the region. Over the next five years, CCASAnet will assess the HIV continuum of care, HIV care outcomes among those "lost to follow-up", and pregnant women. The network will also focus on prediction and prevention of non-communicable diseases as well as treatment outcomes in tuberculosis patients with and without HIV. We will also characterize psychosocial, behavioral, and non-communicable disease clinical outcomes in adolescents and older persons through new prospective cohorts nested in the CCASAnet retrospective clinical cohort. We will continue to develop and apply innovative biostatistics and informatics methods, expand our productive collaborations with other IeDEA regions, and provide leadership in the site assessment, data harmonization, and data sharing initiatives. Through these activities, CCASAnet will help advance both the science of HIV epidemiology and the information science that underpins international research collaboration.
