Biography
Dr. Katzenstein completed his undergraduate and medical degrees as well as a residency in Internal Medicine and Fellowship training in Infectious Diseases at the University of California San Diego. He continued fellowship training in virology and Infectious Diseases with Dr. Colin Jordan at U.C. Davis, moving to the University of Minnesota to a faculty position in Infectious Disease in 1984. He was a visiting lecturer for two years in the Departments of Medical Microbiology and Medicine at the University University of Zimbabwe as the AIDS epidemic was first recognized in Southern Africa. In 1987, he returned to the U.S. to take up a senior research fellowship at the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) at the Food and Drug Administration in the Vaccine Branch, evaluating early candidate HIV Vaccines and diagnostics. Dr. Katzenstein returned to California in 1989 to work with Dr. Thomas Merigan and the AIDS Clinical Trials Group. He continues an active collaboration with his colleagues in Zimbabwe and Southern Africa in prevention, perinatal transmission and vaccine research. At Stanford, Dr. Katzenstein participates in studies of multiple drugs and drug combinations in Clinical Trials in the U.S. and Europe and is the principal investigator for Stanford’s Virology Service Laboratory in the center for AIDS Research. At Stanford he teaches an undergraduate course in Global AIDS, attends on the Infectious Disease service and supervises both laboratory and clinical fellows conducting AIDS Research. He remains actively involved in studies of HIV infection in Zimbabwe, spending 2-3 months a year in Southern Africa.
Abstract
Affordable Treatment & Intervention to Prevent Drug Resistance Among HIV Infected Women & Their Infants in Southern Africa
The growing global AIDS pandemic calls for decisive translational research programs to develop feasible and affordable strategies to mitigate the suffering and death of the more than 25 million people in Africa infected with HIV. Effective antiretroviral drugs and sophisticated molecular diagnostics, developed and widely used in Europe and North America are inaccessible to the vast majority of infected people. Dr. Katzenstein’s studies will evaluate the safety, effectiveness and the risks of intermittent combination therapies with inexpensive reverse transcriptase (RT) inhibitors in subtype C HIV infection, the kind of virus that accounts for more than half the AIDS in the world. The capacity of short course of drugs to reduce selection and shedding of drug resistant virus will be tested, while assessing the risks and benefits of intermittent combination drug therapies. The intermittent use of combination treatments, a concept piloted at the National Institutes of Health, offers the potential for reduction in the cost and complexity, drug toxicity and the risk of viral resistance associated with standard therapy. The proposed studies are collaborative clinical trials developed in collaboration with the University of Zimbabwe, the Ministry of Health and the Zimbabwe AIDS Prevention Project, and conducted by investigators from the University of Zimbabwe and Stanford University.