UNC-Chapel Hill Hosts Health Officials from Guangzhou
June 28, 2018
Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases
The UNC Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases welcomed six top health officials from the Guangzhou Eighth People’s Hospital in Guangzhou, China. The delegation traveled to the United States to meet with infectious diseases specialists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to discuss strengthening established research ties to allow the Chinese site to conduct more clinical trials.
“The Guangzhou Eighth People’s Hospital is taking steps to be a leader in HIV treatment in China, just as UNC-Chapel Hill has done in the US,” said Feng Li, principal investigator of the Institute of Infectious Diseases at the Guangzhou Eighth People’s Hospital.
UNC-Chapel Hill researchers have been working in Guangzhou for years. UNC Project-China, led by director Joseph Tucker, is based there. Tucker, assistant professor in the UNC School of Medicine, and his team work collaboratively with Chinese partners, including clinicians and researchers at the Guangzhou Eighth People’s Hospital. The hospital is southern China’s largest hospital specializing in infectious diseases with a domestic center dedicated to comprehensive HIV care. The hospital provides inpatient care to more than 1,000 people each day and more than 7,500 people living with HIV each year.
The Guangzhou Eighth People’s Hospital signed a memorandum of understanding with UNC-Chapel Hill in 2017, formalizing a partnership in research and training. The hospital’s research projects include the social science and ethics of HIV cure research as well as crowdsourcing to improve hepatitis testing among men who have sex with men.
The hospital’s delegation would like to further this research and training partnership by:
- becoming a clinical research site of the UNC Global HIV Treatment and Prevention Clinical Trials Unit;
- joining the National Institutes of Health’s AIDS Clinical Trials Group as a qualified member hospital;
- establishing an exchange training program for doctors, nurses and researchers; and
- expanding the current UNC-Guangzhou Eighth People’s Hospital postdoctoral fellowship program.
“Our main purpose is to increase our research and training opportunities,” said Weiping Cai, director of the Department of Infectious Diseases at the Guangzhou Eighth People’s Hospital. “We’ve collaborated with UNC for a long time and we would like to strengthen this core relationship.”