WELCOME

Sub-Saharan Africa, with the highest number of persons living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) in the world - 25.8 million (65%) - faces an enormous challenge in scaling up access to antiretroviral therapy (ART) to extend survival among those infected. One of the main challenges to success is monitoring and evaluating patient adherence and the prevalence of drug resistance in treated cohorts. To keep large-scale ART efficient and affordable for the large numbers of HIV-positive patients in need, a balance must be achieved between safety and efficacy monitoring, the affordability and scalability of programs and the evaluation of adherence, drug resistance and clinical outcomes.

In light of the World Health Organization (WHO) campaign to increase access to ART in resource-limited settings, the Southern African Treatment and Resistance Network (SATuRN) was established in 2005 in order to explore the impact of large-scale ART on the development of HIV drug resistance. SATuRN is a collaborative network between the Division of International Health (IHCAR) - Karolinska Institutet, Sweden; the School of Medicine - Stanford University (SU), USA; the National Institute of Communicable Diseases (NICD) - National Health Laboratory Services (NHLS), South Africa; the Medical Research Council (MRC), South Africa; and the South African National Bioinformatics Institute (SANBI), South Africa. Starting in 2006, the network plans to conduct a prospective cohort study of approximately 10,000 patients treated with ART in order to monitor HIV drug resistance.

SATuRN Project Network Map

	= Research Institution
	= ARV Treatment Program