Brief communication: Changing the research landscape: the New York City Clinical Data Research Network

The New York City Clinical Data Research Network (NYC-CDRN), funded by the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), brings together 22 organizations including seven independent health systems to enable patient-centered clinical research, support a national network, and facilitate learning healthcare systems. The NYC-CDRN includes a robust, collaborative governance and organizational infrastructure, which takes advantage of its participants’ experience, expertise, and history of collaboration. The technical design will employ an information model to document and manage the collection and transformation of clinical data, local institutional staging areas to transform and validate data, a centralized data processing facility to aggregate and share data, and use of common standards and tools. We strive to ensure that our project is patient-centered; nurtures collaboration among all stakeholders; develops scalable solutions facilitating growth and connections; chooses simple, elegant solutions wherever possible; and explores ways to streamline the administrative and regulatory approval process across sites.     

Vaccine-induced protection from infection of mice by chimeric human immunodeficiency virus type 1, EcoHIV/NL4-3

EcoHIV/NL4-3 is a chimeric human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) that can productively infect mice. This study tests the utility of EcoHIV/NL4-3 infection to reveal protective immune responses to an HIV-1 vaccine. Immunocompetent mice were first immunized with VRC 4306 which encodes subtype B consensus sequences of gag, pol, and nef and then were infected by EcoHIV/NL4-3. Anti-Gag antibodies were sampled during immunization and infection. The extent of EcoHIV/NL4-3 infection in spleen cells and peritoneal macrophages was determined by quantitative real-time PCR (QPCR).

Although antibody titres were not significantly different in control and vaccinated groups, VRC 4306 immunization induced protective responses that significantly reduced virus burden in both lymphocyte and macrophage compartments. These results indicate that EcoHIV/NL4-3 infection can be controlled by HIV-1 vaccine-induced responses, introducing a small animal model to test vaccine efficacy against HIV-1 infection.