COVID-19 Conversations with PROFESSOR GRAEME MEINTJIES & DR. AMY WARD

This week we speak to Professor Graeme Meintjes who is an Infectious Diseases Physician and the Second Chair and Deputy Head of the Department of Medicine at the University of Cape Town. He also holds the South African Research Chairs Initiative (SARChI) Chair of Poverty-related Infections. Over the last year, he and colleagues at Groote Schuur Hospital have been managing patients with COVID-19 admitted to the wards at the hospital.

We also spoke to Dr Amy Ward (MBBCh, DipHIVMan) who is the Site Director of the UCT Khayelitsha Clinical Research Site (CRS) and a qualified medical doctor who has worked in the community of Khayelitsha for 8 years. She is an experienced clinical trialist focusing on HIV and TB and more recently COVID-19. She is currently leading the Khayelitsha CRS team as Principal Investigator (PI) on two COVID-19 vaccine trials and sits as National PI for one of the world’s largest COVID-19 natural history observational cohort studies.

Professor Graeme Meintjes and Principal Investigator Amy Ward discussed this new phase one vaccine trial that will use a second-generation human adenovirus 5 – initially designed for therapeutic cancer vaccines and now repurposed for SARS-CoV-2.

COVID-19 Conversations are brought to you by The Vaccine Advocacy Resource Group & The African Alliance with support from the South African Medical Research Council and the Department of Science and Innovation. They are presented in partnership with the Community Constituency COVID-19 Front, the Treatment Action Campaign and APHA.