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Andrea Foulkes receives $1.1 million grant to develop new statistical methods for AIDS research
Assistant professor of biostatistics has been awarded a five-year, $1.1 million grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to develop new statistical methods to be used in AIDS research and prevention.
Andrea S. Foulkes, assistant professor of biostatistics at the School of Public Health and Health Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has been awarded a five-year, $1.1 million grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to develop new statistical methods to be used in AIDS research and prevention.
Foulkes says currently there is an explosion of genetic and immunological information about HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, and the patients infected with the virus. What’s missing, she says, are ways to analyze that information to predict how certain individuals will be affected and to make clear decisions about treatment options and strategies. In addition, she says, HIV mutates, or changes over time, requiring treatment options to change if they are to be successful. Yet another factor to consider involves side effects from the powerful drugs used to treat the disease, and deciding when those side effects counter balance the positive impact of the treatment regimen.
Using the grant, Foulkes, working with colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania, the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, and Harvard School of Public Health, will design statistical systems to handle this large number of variables. These include patients’ genetic makeup, their immune system response to infection, a range of treatment “cocktails” of multiple drugs, and information about viral genetic sequence that will be helpful to doctors seeking the right treatment for each patient.
One desirable outcome, she says, would be to develop methods to identify early changes in the virus, or a patient’s biological makeup, that would predict how this patient will be doing several years down the road.
“This is really about individual care,” Foulkes says. “The vast array of patient and viral specific biological information now available presents an exciting opportunity. We now need to be able to translate these data into appropriate care for each person.”
Foulkes joined the university in September 2004. She earned her doctorate in biostatistics at the Harvard School of Public Health in 2000, and was a postdoctoral research fellow there until 2002. She served on the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Medicine from 2002 to 2004. Foulkes earned her bachelor’s degree from Brown University in 1994.