Presentation of Copenhagen HIV Programme
History:
CHIP was founded in 1998 as a reseach section within the department of infectious diseases at Hvidovre University Hospital which has a long tradition for clinical management of HIV-infected persons and was among the first to diagnose and treat AIDS patients when the epidemic first broke out. In 2002, CHIP became an independent research department.
CHIP’s main office is now located at the University of Copenhagen, the Faculty of Health Sciences in Copenhagen, Denmark - with cooperating offices in Germany, UK, Spain and Portugal.
Work:
This is divided into two main sections, clinical trials and cohorte studies.
· The main focus areas in the clinical section, are management of treatment strategies (the SMART study), the use of Interleukin 2 as an add-on to traditional treatment (SILCAAT and Esprit studies), and various minor trials studying, among other things, new drug combination therapies (i.e. ALCAR, NRTI Sparing studies).
· In the Cohorte studies the main focus are cardiovascular and lipid sideeffects as well as development of resistance to standard treatments. They also address more general questions on epidemiology and virology (EuroSIDA and DAD trials).
Funding:
CHIP works primarily with the aid of public grants from the EU and the NIH (National Institutes of Health), USA, but also has cooperation with the pharmaceutical industry.
CHIP is purely a non-profit research department working strictly for the benefit of science and not for any special interests.
Future:
We will continue to develop in-house IT strategy, rigorously monitor our systems, develop and use the latest technology to reduce potential errors to an acceptable margin.
We have continuous training, language and personnel development to meet the challenges in the field as well as in the office.
CHIP will continue to expand its activities, adding new trials and new personnel as called for by the ever changing challenge of HIV.
Updated: 19 Dec 2007