Canada's COVAXHIV Study Receives Funding

The Government of Canada, through its COVID-19 Immunity Task Force (CITF) and Vaccine Surveillance Reference Group (VSRG), announced on June 16, 2021, it is investing approximately $1.75 million in the COVAXHIV study that will assess the immune responses, safety, and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccination for about 67,000 Canadians living with HIV.

This extensive study is further supported by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the CIHR Canadian HIV Trials Network (CTN), and Stop the Spread Ottawa, bringing the total funding to more than $2.6 million.

“There have been very limited data from clinical trials for this at-risk community,” commented Dr. Aslam Anis, Principal Investigator, National Director of the CTN, and Director of the University of British Columbia’s School of Population and Public Health, in a press release.

A small number of people living with HIV who are in stable health and without other medical conditions have been included in previous clinical trials for COVID-19 vaccines, but the information is not generalizable to specific key vulnerable populations that have not been studied yet.

“Our COVAXHIV study focuses on older patients, those who have suppressed levels of white blood cells that fight infection (CD4 T-cells), and people with multiple medical conditions,” explains CTN Co-Principal Investigator Dr. Cecilia Costiniuk, Associate Professor at McGill University’s Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences and Scientist at the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI-MUHC).

Dr. Costiniuk and Co-Investigator Dr. Curtis Cooper, Associate Professor at the University of Ottawa’s Division of Infectious Diseases and Scientist with The Ottawa Hospital, will recruit 400 people living with HIV from clinics in Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, and Vancouver to determine COVID-19 immune responses.

The first part of the study will evaluate how well antibodies react to fight off SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19, up to a year after vaccination. That data will be compared with the immune reactions from a control group of 100 people who do not have HIV.

The second part of the study will look at vaccine effectiveness in people living with HIV compared to people who do not have HIV through a population-based analysis of provincial public health records in Ontario and British Columbia. This part will be led by CTN Investigators Dr. Ann Burchell, Associate Professor at the University of Toronto and Research Director at St. Michael’s Hospital’s Department of Family and Community Medicine, Unity Health Toronto, and Dr. Hasina Samji, Assistant Professor at Simon Fraser University and Senior Scientist at the BC Centre for Disease Control and is supported in part by the Ontario HIV Treatment Network.

The Government of Canada established the COVID-19 Immunity Task Force in late April 2020.