August 4, 2021
Julie Dumond, Pharm.D., M.S., is focused on improving the lives of patients living with HIV.
Dumond, a faculty member in the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy’s Division of Pharmacotherapy and Experimental Therapeutics (DPET) is primarily focused on the pharmacokinetics/pharmacodynamics of antiretrovirals for HIV treatment and prevention. Her recent five-year, $3,453,929 grant from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, will help propel her latest research, “Quantifying Sex-and-Age-Related Differences in Antiretroviral Exposure and Adverse Effects in the MACS/WIHS Combined Cohort Study.” MACS/WIHS, meaning Multicenter AIDS Clinical Study/Women’s Interagency HIV Study.
The long-term objective of the proposed work is to provide evidenced-based recommendations for minimizing metabolic adverse events, particularly weight gain, in a diverse population of people living with HIV by identifying and quantifying variability in drug exposure that may increase risk of side effects in patients.
Dumond will work alongside UNC collaborators Dr. Ada Adimora and Dr. Steve Cole, as well as HIV investigators at Emory, Johns Hopkins, and UCSF.
The team will consider a broad array of modifying factors of drug exposure, including demographic characteristics, prior laboratory values, body anthropometrics, frailty phenotype, and pharmacogenomics. Their focus is on the integrase strand transfer inhibitors, dolutegravir (and bictegravir, as well as tenofovir alafenamide.
“The funding will help my research, in that it will enable my team to study pharmacokinetics of three widely used antiretrovirals in aging people with HIV and women with HIV, who are very often not included in the pivotal clinical trials for drug approval,” Dumond said. “The MWCCS cohort also allows us to include women of color, who make up around 80% of the women in the cohort. Clinicians have observed that Black patients, women, and older patients are at increased likelihood of gaining weight with some of these newer HIV drugs, and we don’t know much about how their PK profiles might differ from the ‘typical’ study participant. We can then look at the link between the PK and the weight gain, if there is one.”
Dumond added her overall research goal is to use modeling and simulation methods to improve treatment outcomes for people living with HIV.
“My hope with this study is that we’ll be able to identify who might be better served by choosing a different HIV regimen that will cause fewer side effects. I also hope that this will help convince pharmaceutical companies to do more to enhance diversity within their clinical trial populations; recently published studies that are not in women only have poorly represented the actual patients who will use these drugs. By engaging such patients earlier in the clinical development, we can hopefully figure out how to mitigate side effect risk before waiting for problems to pop up in post-marketing use,” she said.
In addition to receiving this significant grant funding, Dumond was also promoted to associate professor with tenure in DPET, effective July 1.
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