Adaora Adimora

Adimora's research program centers on understanding patterns of HIV/AIDS transmission among heterosexual African Americans and has highlighted the role economic and social forces play in the HIV epidemic. In her work, she highlights the importance of sexual network patterns on the spread of the infection. In a 2007 study, she used data from the National Survey of Family Growth, in which a cohort of nearly 5,000 men reported their sexual activity, and found that approximately one in ten men have concurrent sexual partners, which can increase the rate at which sexually transmitted infections like HIV can spread.[3]

Adimora has also applied her research expertise towards developing evidence-based policy solutions to prevent the spread of HIV. In 2018, she developed a proposal to change the way clinical trials for HIV prevention are approached among populations who have lower incidence of the infection.[4] Randomized clinical trials, which require thousands of participants, are the gold standard for determining a treatment's effectiveness. However, if the number of people who have a particular condition is low, as with conditions that affect minority populations, conducting randomized clinical trials is not possible. For such cases, Adimora and her colleagues proposed a new method to estimate the effectiveness of drugs by combining clinical and pharmacological data from traditional clinical trials with those collected from smaller studies.[5]

Adimora is the principal investigator of the UNC site of the Women's Interagency HIV Study (WIHS), which seeks to understand the impact of HIV in women with funding primarily from various Institutes of the National Institutes of Health.[6]

Adimora formerly served on the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS, which is tasked with advising the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services on strategies to prevent HIV and promote treatment. Notably, Adimora remained on the Council even after six members exited in June 2017, expressing frustrations with President Donald Trump's healthcare policies.[7] In an interview, she told BuzzFeed News: "I decided to stay on because I thought that for me it would be best to use my voice from within the council to try to favorably impact policies that affect people with and at risk for HIV, health care providers, and public health."[8] She was, however, openly critical of the administration's healthcare policies, co-authoring an opinion editorial warning that the proposed American Health Care Act of 2017 (which never passed) would lead to the unnecessary deaths of Americans, leaving the poorest Americans uninsured.[9] In August 2017, the Council wrote a letter to Tom Price, who was then Secretary of Health and Human Services, outlining the impact of repealing the Affordable Health Care Act on HIV prevention.[10]

Adimora also formerly served as the chair of the HIV Medical Association, an organization of medical professionals who practice HIV medicine. During her tenure as chair, Turing Pharmaceuticals, the company founded by Martin Shkreli, increased the price of a drug called Daraprim by over 4000 percent.[11] The drug is used to treat the parasitic infection toxoplasmosis, which can be severe for patients with compromised immune systems and for pregnant women. Adimora co-authored a letter to the pharmaceutical company advising they revise their pricing strategy for the drug, urging the company to "help [them] improve public health by immediately implementing a rational and fair pricing strategy."[11][12] In March 2016, she testified in front of the United States Senate's Special Committee on Aging about the consequences of such drug price increases on vulnerable populations who cannot afford the drugs they need.[13][14]