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  A mass spectometer donated by the Waters Corporation will allow Chiedza Maponga and graduate students from the University of Zimbabwe to better treat HIV/AIDS patients in the African nation. Photo: DOUGLAS LEVERE

By MARY COCHRANE

Published: January 19, 2012

Chiedza Maponga, director of the University of Zimbabwe (UZ) pharmacy program, knows that he alone can’t treat the hundreds of thousands of patients with HIV in his native country.

But he believes he can do it with help.

This year, help arrived in the form of four graduate students—three of them AIDS International Training and Research Program fellows—who traveled with Maponga from Zimbabwe to UB to train in a collaborative program that prepares them to treat HIV/AIDS patients.

Maponga has spent the past decade in Zimbabwe and at UB training such students so they can join him in this critical effort.

With approximately one in 10 people in Zimbabwe living with HIV, the country is in the midst of one of the harshest AIDS epidemics in the world.

But Maponga points to the fact that his homeland is the only African nation showing a downward trend in HIV cases in recent years: From a peak of 26.5 percent of the adult population being infected in 1997, the figure has dropped steadily, to 23.7 percent in 2001 and to 14.3 percent in 2010.

Part of the credit for that drop, he says, goes to the International Center for HIV/AIDS Pharmacotherapy Research and Training (ICHAPRT), a program that he created 10 years ago with Gene D. Morse, professor in the UB School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences and associate director of UB’s New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences.

Morse approached Maponga, a 1988 UB pharmacy graduate who returned to Africa to become the first clinical pharmacist in Zimbabwe, about collaborating on training at their two universities. Both wanted a program that would produce clinical scientists focused on translational pharmacology and medication management for HIV patients in developing nations.

“Through the program, these professionals gain more knowledge in how best to prescribe antiretrovirals to HIV patients, which contributes to the patients remaining on HIV medications longer,” Morse says.

This year, the four Zimbabwean postgraduate fellows traveled to Buffalo to study the newest methods and to learn on state-of-the-art instrumentation used to treat AIDS/HIV, thanks to a donation of the equipment from Waters Corporation.

Valued at $450,000, the equipment—the second such gift from Waters—offers the fellows a chance to work with the latest technology used to treat HIV/AIDS, according to Morse.

“There are limited opportunities for the fellows to receive this type of hands-on, high-tech training at UZ,” he says. “Therefore, the equipment enables them to gain crucial experience with the newest instruments that are being used in research studies to measure HIV medications.”

Maponga says he and Morse are “tremendously grateful” to Waters for the donation, which allows them to teach the most effective and contemporary methods to their students.

“This equipment provides invaluable opportunities in our training program,” Morse says, adding that he and Maponga are working to outfit the UZ laboratories in a similar fashion. “We hope that future opportunities arise that will bring these same instruments to the growing pharmacology specialty laboratory at UZ.”

Samuel Gavi, one of the four Zimbabwe students, has been working with Maponga since 2001, when he was an honors student in the UZ pharmacy graduate program. He graduated, then worked in HIV clinical research at the university before earning an MS in epidemiology at the University of California-Berkeley.

He now works developing methods “that intersect epidemiology, pharmacology and health informatics for the purpose of improving long-term clinical management of HIV infection, as well as associated AIDS-defining illnesses.”

Gavi says his research and travels have shown him that collaboration among countries, no matter how distant or disparate economically, is the best way to fight the battle against HIV/AIDS.

“The collaboration between the University at Buffalo and the University of Zimbabwe is a unique example of the international research efforts being undertaken worldwide, with emphasis on building capacity through exchange of technology and experience,” he says. “We have come to realize that in spite of the technological gaps that exist, we have a lot of things in common and can therefore develop systems that can be useful in both worlds.”

Another AITRP fellow, Takudzwa Mtisi, is a 2006 UZ honors graduate in medical laboratory sciences who earned an MS in medical microbiology at UZ this year. She hopes to eventually work with Maponga in developing the laboratory at UZ.

Mtisi believes that the collaboration with UB is the best way to eventually produce a strong faculty and research staff for the Zimbabwean university.

“At UB, the people are the best. They are always willing to impart their knowledge and take their time to help when you need it,” she says. “I believe having access to the best facilities and resources alone boils down to nothing: We will need such trained professional at UZ to help students navigate their way around.”

Mtisi has worked at the HIV/immunology lab at the Parirenyatwa Hospital Public Health Laboratories, “one of the largest public health institutions in Zimbabwe,” and at the National Microbiology Reference Laboratory, which manages government-based research projects and processes surveys and queries of national interest, such as data on national outbreaks.

UB plans to ship one of the high-performance liquid chromatographs (HPLC) to UZ for use there in student fellow training, a move that Mtisi says will make it possible for her country to train its students in their homeland.

“We are lagging behind only in terms of resources and facilities, and it would go a long way if we received updated equipment for use in our labs, as well the funds to enable us to carry out research,” she says.