Centers for AIDS Research (CFAR)

The Centers for AIDS Research (CFAR) program at the National Institutes of Health provides administrative and shared research support to synergistically enhance and coordinate high quality AIDS research projects. CFARs accomplish this through core facilities that provide expertise, resources, and services not otherwise readily obtained through more traditional funding mechanisms.

The Ending the HIV Epidemic in the U.S. (EHE) initiative was launched in 2019 by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) with the goal to end the HIV epidemic in the U.S. within 10 years. To achieve this goal and address the ongoing public health crisis of HIV, EHE will leverage the powerful data and tools now available to reduce new HIV infections in the United States by 75 percent in five years and by 90 percent by 2030. The Centers for AIDS Research, along with the National Institute of Mental Health's AIDS Research Centers, have played a key role in informing HHS partners in this initiative on best practices based on state-of-the-art biomedical research findings, and by collecting and disseminating data on the effectiveness of approaches used in this initiative.

Between 2019-2023, NIH announced supplemental awards to the CFARs and ARCs to support research to enhance the implementation science knowledge base needed for EHE. These projects required partnerships between academic researchers and community partners to determine how best to get effective prevention and treatment tools to the people who need it. Additionally, the NIH is supporting a coordinating and data management center, the Implementation Science Coordination Initiative (ISCI), and multiple implementation research consultative hubs across the U.S. to develop generalizable knowledge from local knowledge by encouraging the use of shared implementation frameworks and harmonized measures, synthesizing data across projects, and encouraging cross-project collaboration. New EHE funding in 2024 and beyond will support larger independent research projects, including investigator-initiated projects outside of the CFARs and ARCs. However, the partnerships and knowledge base built by these institutes will continue to play a large role in the EHE initiative.