British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS

06/20/2026

Congratulations to Dr. Harrison Omondi who successfully defended his PhD thesis earlier this Spring and received his doctorate last week at SFU’s Faculty of Health Sciences convocation!

Originally working at the Kenya Medical Research Institute for the Centre for Global Health Research, Dr. Omondi’s previous experience includes clinical trial research studies such as HIV Prevention Trials Network (HPTN), the AIDS Clinical Trials Network (ACTG), and the HIV Vaccine Trials Network (HVTN).

He joined SFU Faculty of Health Sciences in 2017 to undertake graduate studies under the supervision of Dr. Zabrina Brumme, where his thesis reflected a shift from clinical implementation science to basic science research. Inspired by what he had seen through his work in Kenya, where interventions were developed and translated to bedside science, his thesis focused on increasing the representation of diverse and underrepresented populations in HIV persistence research.

Dr. Omondi's goal through his continued work with both BC-CfE and SFU laboratories is to contribute to our growing base of knowledge to inform a safe and effective HIV cure strategy that will benefit all people.

Join us in congratulating Dr. Omondi on this milestone, and your continued dedication to this important work!

06/06/2026

Congratulations to Claudette Cardinal whose work with the Feast Centre for Indigenous STBBI Research received an Honorary Mention recognition as an Emerging Community-Based Researcher at the 2026 Community-Based Research Canada (CBRCanada) Awards!

We would do Claudette a disservice by trying to synthesize CBRCanada’s great description of all that she does, so we include it unedited below:

“Claudette Cardinal is an Indigenous Community Fellow with the Feast Centre for Indigenous STBBI Research whose community-based research demonstrates excellence through Indigenous-led, relational, and ethically grounded practice. Her work centres Indigenous people living with HIV and prioritizes community leadership, cultural safety, and relational accountability across all stages of research. In multiple community-driven projects, she ensures community members co-define priorities, shape methods, interpret findings, and guide knowledge sharing, aligning research with community-identified needs. Grounded in Indigenized ethnography, her work integrates Elder-led teachings, autoethnography, community dialogue, and arts-based methods to reflect holistic understandings of health and lived experience. A key contribution is the Community at the HeART Framework, which supports ethical, community-led research while resisting extractive approaches. Through arts-based projects such as The Stat’s Talk Back and The ART of the Matter… Double Vision, she mobilizes knowledge using storytelling and visual art to share experiences with HIV treatment in accessible, trauma-informed ways, translating research into action that reduces stigma and strengthens community care and advocacy.”

Join us in congratulating Claudette for this well-deserved honour, and learn more about all the incredible recipients of the 2026 Awards at https://www.communityresearchcanada.ca/posts/meet-the-recipients-of-the-2026-community-based-research-excellence-awards

04/27/2026

For those bleary-eyed folks who enjoyed the gala Saturday night, Sunday kicked off the final day of CAHR 2026.

With one last oral presentation, Graduate Research Assistant Nandini Krishnan and Peer Support Specialist Douglas Vickers kicked off the final Epidemiology & Public Health session, sharing findings from Hope to Health Centre looking at barriers to STBBI testing among clients of the Supervised Consumption Site (SCS) to identify opportunities to enhance client-centered approaches.

Overall, STBBI knowledge amongst clients at the SCS was high and they found increased testing engagement was associated with frequent SCS use and primary care engagement. However, systematic-level stigma still remains, suggesting increased access and inclusive care is still necessary.

Highlighting our final poster presentations of the week, Research Coordinator Katie Timms and Research Assistant Nicole Peigan shared early reflections from the Talking Circles they have been leading across BC as part of the CARE (the Community, Aboriginal, Relationships, Experience) Study, listening to Indigenous experiences and insights on HIV care pathways. Sharing further updates from the SHAPE Study, Research Coordinator Farnaz Azarmju's second poster focused on the health priorities of PWH in BC, with their HIV condition, mental health and cardiovascular health ranking as the top three.

A trio of posters from the BC-CfE Laboratory program included Postdoctoral Fellow Dr. Aniqa Shahid's poster looking at the preservation of historical HIV drug resistance across intact and defective proviruses. Research Assistant Evan Barad's second poster focused on a clinical case study seeking to explain why a participant experienced prolonged HIV DNAemia caused by a massively-expanded CD4+ T-cell clone which harboured a genetically defective provirus. Also presenting her second poster at CAHR, Research Assistant Amanda Cabral da Silva explored the potential drivers and inflammatory consequences of persistent low level viremia during HIV therapy from a longitudinal cohort.

Switching to posters from the COAST Study, Research Coordinator Dr. Michael Budu examined the influence of s*x and HIV status on complications during nonfatal overdose (NFOD) hospitalizations, finding PWH experience a higher burden of acute complications during hospitalizations with risk differing significantly by s*x. Research Coordinator Silke Hansen presented a scoping review on how NFOD are defined within administrative data research across the US and Canada, finding substantial variation which hampers our accuracy in reporting overdose data and could misinform the targeted initiatives used to address overdoses.

Finally we end where we began these conference recaps with Research Scientist Dr. Surita Parashar's engaging poster (she proved too elusive for this photographer, however in fairness she made time to take a photo after moderating an afternoon session, however they had taken down the posters). Her poster explored how working alongside Peer Researchers can improve administrative data research, better identifying what is counted, how it is interpreted, and whose experiences are made visible.

After one final special session on decentralized STBBI testing, we moved onto the New Investigator Awards and closing remarks. Congratulations to Postdoctoral Fellow Dr. Aki Gormezano who received the New Investigator Award in the Epidemiology & Public Health track!

And with that CAHR 2026 comes to a close! Thank you to the organizers, all the volunteers and everyone who attended. Whether you presented, engaged in dialogue, or just absorbed all the knowledge from this week, we are all better for it and we will take this back to our communities to strengthen Canada’s response to HIV. See you next year in Montreal!

04/26/2026

Saturday at CAHR 2026 kicked off with an early start, as Dr. Kathleen Inglis and Wayne Campbell provided an overview of the HIV & Eng/aging Project, and how it’s applying a community-based approach to administrative health data research, as part of the CIHR Pan-Canadian Network for HIV and STBBI Clinical Trials Postdoctoral Fellows morning symposium.

After a fantastic opening plenary from Linda-Gail Bekker, Graduate Research Assistant Santiago Aguilera Mijares opened the morning session, presenting data from the first phase of the Momentum Study which looked at factors associated with event-level concurrent drug use and condomless a**l s*x. The findings illustrated the need for integration of substance use and s*xual harm reduction within STI clinics. Postdoctoral Fellow Dr. Katherine Kooij followed with a presentation looking at the possible association of ritonavir and cobicistat on increasing odds of fatal opioid overdose, finding exposure to ritonavir appeared not to increase risk of fatal opioid overdose.

Over in the Epidemiology & Public Health session, Postdoctoral Research Fellow Dr. Aki Gormezano shared new work exploring ethnoracial differences in bacterial STI incidence and predictors. Two presentations later, Research Scientist Dr. David Moore presented data from the Engage Study looking at HIV treatment effectiveness and durability among GBM, finding low rates of unsuppressed HIV among their cohorts.

Upstairs in the poster hall, Peer Indigenous Research Associate Claudette MorinCardinal was an in-demand presenter, walking numerous people through her highly engaging poster on IndigenEyes: An Ethnographic, Land Based, and Arts-Guided Journey of Healing with a Cree Woman Living with HIV.

SHAPE Research Coordinator Farnaz Azarmju presented one of her two posters today on housing stability for people living with HIV (PWH), examining the intersecting structural and psychosocial factors that impact stable housing over time. Research Coordinator Ly Nguyen’s poster looked at improving gaps in cause-specific mortality reporting for PWH during the toxic drug crisis and COVID-19 pandemic, finding that many unknown-cause deaths among PWH were likely drug-related.

Research Assistant Amanda Cabral da Silva’s first of two posters tested a proof-of-concept study to characterize the gut HIV reservoir in living donors, by applying the Intact Proviral DNA Assay and proviral sequencing.

Finally, Laboratory Director Dr. Zabrina Brumme shared her introductory poster on the establishment of The Canadian Alliance for Transplant-related Cures in HIV (CATCH): a pan-Canada network for monitoring HIV cure following allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation. In light of today’s announcement of the Toronto Patient, possibly the world’s 10th person cured of HIV, this network is particularly relevant in order to monitor transplant-related HIV cures.

04/25/2026

The BC-CfE kicked off the 2026 Canadian Conference on HIV Research (CAHR 2026) Program with a busy day for our research teams.

Research Coordinator Shinta Thio was kept busy today delivering two oral presentations on hepatitis C (HCV). Opening the day, Thio presented the results of a quality improvement initiative that leveraged the centralized power of the Drug Treatment Program (DTP) to identify folks receiving PrEP and HIV treatment who who had a detectable HCV record for more than six months, and sent a reminder to their provider encouraging HCV follow-up, improving care completion. After lunch, she presented research focused on the cascade of care among DTP participants, finding high levels of HCV screening and low levels of HCV viremia among both PrEP and HIV Treatment arms of the DTP.

In Basic Sciences, PhD Student Maggie Duncan presented new research on the impact of HIV polymorphism on the intact proviral DNA assay (IPDA), identifying several polymorphisms that cause IPDA failure, helping guide future testing to avoid wasting samples while increasing the success rate of IPDA and informing adaption to other HIV subtypes.

In the afternoon Epidemiology and Public Health session, Ly Nguyen presented new COAST Study data that sought to examine misclassified unknown-cause death data comparing people living with HIV (PWH) and people without (PWoH), in an effort to better estimate the prevalence of overdose deaths among PWH. The a**lysis found a strong resemblance between unknown-cause and drug-related deaths among PWH (compared to PWoH) that suggests the potential undercounting of drug-related deaths among PWH in BC. Postdoctoral Researcher Anh Khoa Vo followed, presenting on the impact of intersectionality of sociodemographic variables on mortality among PWH, examining structural vulnerability and finding that high vulnerability was associated with significantly higher mortality.

Over in the poster hall, Silke Hansen presented COAST research into the impact of COVID-19 on non-fatal overdose (NFOD) among PWH, highlighting community-identified needs for stronger overdose prevention/care, increased access to peer support and mental/detox services, and gathering spaces promoting safety and community. Also focusing on NFOD among PWH, Nicholas Naidu used COAST data to examine s*x differences in healthcare utilization, finding that both males and females had higher healthcare utilization in the year before a NFOD.

Two community-based research posters enjoyed wide team support in presenting their findings. Antonio Marante, Tim Wesseling and Farnaz Azarmju shared that the top three HIV supports and community services identified in the SHAPE Study were access to: AIDS service organizations, food banks/meal programs and peer support services. Peggy Frank and Wayne Campbell joined Miriam Muirhead presenting data from the HIV & Eng/aging Study that found PWH were more likely to have recurrent cardiovascular events compared to PWoH.

Research Assistant Evan Barad’s poster presented a unique case study of non-suppressible viremia where the participant’s blood proviral pool was exclusively comprised of sequences from early infection; unusual because reservoirs are typically dominated by HIV sequences that circulate immediately pre-ART. Data Management Team Lead Paul Sereda shared challenges/successes from a status-neutral HIV treatment & prevention cohort, while Clinical Research and Trials CoordinatorJoaquin Gomez de la Torre’s poster highlighted how low self-perceived HIV risk may serve as a barrier to PrEP uptake, even among those who are objectively at high risk.

04/24/2026

Congratulations to the CAHR-CANFAR Excellence in Research Award winners, including BC-CfE Research Scientist & SFU Faculty of Health Sciences Adjunct Professor Dr. Surita Parashar, who received the Excellence in Community-Based Research award for her leadership in community-engaged HIV research at last night’s CAHR 2026 Conference Opening.

A passionate researcher with a background in qualitative health research methods, Dr. Parashar co-leads a number of studies here at the BC-CfE with a commitment to participatory community-based approaches to meaningfully engage people facing social structural inequities. The relationships she forms is at the heart of this success, sharing knowledge with new researchers, inspiring teams to think outside the box, and empowering peers to take the lead in community-based research, trusting the true HIV experts – those living with HIV.

Ever the humble researcher, Dr. Parashar insisted in sharing this award with members of her teams who were attendance, sharing this honour with those who helped make this award possible. Join us in congratulating Surita on this very well-deserved honour!

04/08/2026

04/08/2026

“It’s 2:30 in the morning. He should be going to bed, he should not be answering emails and text messages, and making phone calls. That’s exemplary healthcare!”

Darren Lauscher joined the Pulpit Podcast to discuss his healthcare journey including his relationship with long-time HIV specialist Dr. Julio Montaner. Building a collaborative relationship, they were able to tailor treatment regimens that addressed Darren's real-world realities, and in doing so, transformed his HIV care, allowing him to thrive while living with HIV.

Check out the full interview at https://open.spotify.com/episode/7qTpYS4uBgp7UFtidtKmIY.

🏔️"Mountains aren't just places - they're where you discover what you're made of." For Darren Lauscher, the mountains (and ultrarunning them) became a metaphor for life after his 1989 HIV diagnosis: pushing boundaries when the medical world said "you could die," refusing to accept one-size-fits-all care, and still thriving because of it.

In this episode of That One Professional, Darren shares his story with host Matthijs Bosveld: the terror of the early HIV/AIDS era, toxic regimens that demanded bathroom mapping for a decade, failed therapies, and the fear of experimental "salvage" drugs ⚠️💊that could kill on the first dose.

What changed everything? Dr. Julio Montaner 👨‍⚕️, his HIV specialist, who evolved from directive to deeply collaborative: listening to Darren's life as an ultrarunner, adapting meds to real-world realities (no refrigeration issues on trails, timing around hydration/eating), bridging silos (e.g., coordinating with cardiology), and even phoning from Paris at 2:30 a.m. to protect a stable regimen rather than risk change.

Darren's takeaway for healthcare professionals: "It's not about what's easy—it's about what's right." Ask the hard questions, build bridges across specialties, prioritize patient voice, and treat care as a two-way partnership. Darren now brings that lived experience (and cutting-edge research) into classrooms, planting seeds for the next generation. Huge thanks to Darren for his courage, humor, and ongoing advocacy.

Listen now (link in comments) and reflect: How can we better make care fit the person's life, not just the protocol? What "right" choice are we avoiding because it's not easy? ⚖️

🎧 Listen now and reflect.
👉 Link here:

🤝 🤍

03/31/2026

"The world has lost a voice of unmatched eloquence and integrity." - The Lewis Family

Anyone who met Stephen Lewis, knows that these words epitomize a man whose blend of optimism and action, inspired the world to tackle HIV/AIDS head-on and with urgency. If you were fortunate enough to hear him speak in-person, you couldn't help but be left in awe of his cogency, willing to join arms in the fight to ensure that those living with, or at risk of HIV, received treatment regardless of circumstance.

His passion for amplifying the message of those without a voice is evident through his work in Africa, which continues today through the Stephen Lewis Foundation. He knew the world had the tools to end HIV/AIDS, but lacked the political will, something that rings as true today, as it did in the 2000s. Calling on developed countries to lead the way, ensuring scientific advances reach all corners of the globe, Lewis was a moral compass for the world, something we need more than ever!

Among his diplomatic roles, particularly as UN Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, he was a good friend of the BC-CfE and a stalwart supporter of the work accomplished here in BC. He was a champion of Treatment as Prevention from the beginning, even when others doubted the concept, famously saying of BC-CfE Executive Director & Physician-in-Chief Dr. Julio Montaner's role in its creation as someone "who I believe, will one day win a Nobel Prize".

We were especially grateful that Stephen was able to join us in Vancouver last June for the Canadian TasP Summit, where he inspired a new generation of HIV scientists, researchers and policy-makers from across Canada with his passionate call to redouble our efforts to lead the global HIV response. His passion undimmed, he received a standing ovation from all in attendance.

The BC-CfE offers our sincere condolences to Stephen's family, friends and colleagues. We have lost a titan not just in HIV/AIDS, but for social justice and human rights across the world.

03/26/2026

Registration is now open for the Spring 2026 BC-CfE Update, taking place on Friday, June 12, 2026 from 12:00 – 5:00pm. Attendance in person at the Sheraton Wall Centre’s Grand Ballroom is limited, however the event will also be streamed online for those unable to join.

This open educational event sponsored by the BC-CfE will focus on the following:

• Examine key issues affecting communities impacted by HIV in BC;
• Discuss the role of new long-acting injectable antiretrovirals in the treatment and prevention of HIV in BC;
• Summarize current vaccine recommendations for people living with HIV; and
• Review recent insights from HIV cure research.

We invite you to visit https://bccfe.ca/events/bc-cfe-update-spring-2026/ for more information and to register.