My second day at RTI gave me more of a taste of what a real world job in chemistry is like, rather than just the introduction from the first day. In the morning, I sat in on a conference call with Dr. Rothrock. Some of her team was in Washington DC, and experts and leaders in HIV prevention from NIH, USAID, the Gates Foundation and more participated in the conference call. After some initial struggles with technology, we listened to Dr. Rothrock’s core team that is working on HiP, the HIV prevention implant for women in Africa describe their progress in the last year. There were several tasks, with a different team working on each. The first task was finding an effective drug to put inside the delivery device. There have been many HIV prevention medications already developed that are incredibly effective, but some have properties that make them difficult to use in an implant, such as their solubility in water. The second task was to perform animal studies using the implant, which is an ongoing process. We learned that although the studies started in rats, they have moved to using large rabbits, as they can test their blood more often for concentrations of the drugs. The final task that we learned about was the clinical studies. As there is a lot of stigma around taking pills or any HIV prevention medication in many villages in Africa, it is important for researchers to figure out what women will actually use, as the efficacy of the medication and device are irrelevant if they are not being used. One concern expressed by women in villages that surprised everyone on the team was the fear about “thugs” taking the devices from their arm, or wherever they are implanted. Many women shared stories they had heard about devices being ripped from women’s arms, and the thugs would try to smoke them, as they thought it contained traditional “drugs”. There were surveys conducted to the women about the length of time the device would last, biodegradable vs. removable, and flexibility to determine what would be the most popular in villages.
In the afternoon, Kiera and I observed some lab work that was directly related to the HiP project. It was really cool to see the intersection between the business side of science that we had seen in the morning, and the bench science that made the business possible. We watched a biochemist, Dr. Natalie Giourard, measure the concentrations of the drug in viles, which was done to mimic the simultaneous animal study, so that the scientists could predict what they would see in the blood tests of the rabbits. While it sounded simple to record concentrations of just 22 test tube samples, it was quite a tedious process. The devices, which are made out of either polymer film or an extruded polymer tube and filled with either sesame or canola oil, have a semi-permeable membrane that is supposed to release controlled, linear amounts of the drug over time and must be kept sterile. Working under a sterile hood and with disinfected gloves, Dr. Giourard pipetted a fresh salt solution made to mimic the body into 22 new test tubes, and transferred the device from their current test tubes to the fresh ones. She then used a spectrometer to measure the concentrations in each previous vile. Overall, the second day was less interesting than the first, but it was really neat to experience what an actual chemistry job is like on a daily basis.