Zvavahera Chirenje, MD
• Professor (full time) University of California San Francisco, Dept of Obstetrics, Gynaecology & Reproductive Sciences, San Francisco, USA
• Professor (voluntary) University of Zimbabwe Faculty of Medicine & Health Sciences, Harare Zimbabwe
• Principal Investigator (PI) / Director for the University of Zimbabwe Clinical Trials Unit (UZ-UCSF CTU)
In 1994, Dr. Chirenje was one of the founding members of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded University of Zimbabwe - Clinical Trials Research Centre (UZ-CTRC), formerly University of Zimbabwe - University of California, San Francisco (UZ-UCSF) Collaborative Research Programme in Women’s Health. At this facility he conducts pivotal HIV prevention clinical trials in women with particular emphasis on Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) and HIV vaccine development and was instrumental in the establishment of the first HIV vaccine research capacity in Zimbabwe in 2017.
He oversees a research unit with 276 employees in Harare, Zimbabwe and 5 support staff in San Francisco, CA, providing leadership that promotes high quality research for 4 NIH sponsored networks of ACTG, IMPAACT, HPTN and HVTN. Over the past 26 years, Dr Chirenje has overseen the development of a centralized research support unit that coordinates fiscal management and executes NIH protocols at the highest level of data capture and retention of participants with a solid track record of scientific publications that has assisted in policy implementation for Zimbabwe’s Ministry of Health
His long-standing research focus has included evaluating the optimal performance of cervical cancer screening tests in low resource settings, cervical cancer screening and impact of HIV on HPV infections among women, finding safe and effective biomedical HIV prevention interventions for women, STI testing and treatment. Dr. Chirenje was Principal Investigator for a large protocol that screened 11,000 women in Harare, which became an international milestone study demonstrating the effectiveness of visual inspection with acetic acid (VIA) in screening for cervical cancer in low resource settings.
Areas of interest:
• Evaluation of cervical cancer screening & treatment modalities in low resource settings.
• Implementation of HPV vaccination & HPV testing programmes in low resource settings.
• Evaluation of best biomedical HIV prevention methods among women (conducting pivotal HIV prevention trials on PrEP).
• Conducting HIV vaccine safety & efficacy trials.
• Conducting COVID-19 vaccine safety & efficacy trials.