On this episode: Talking with Dr. Moupali Das on leading breakthrough research into a new drug for HIV prevention, the impact it could have for women—and the push to reach those most affected.
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Mentioned in this episode with Dr. Moupali Das:
2024 Breakthrough of the Year, Science, December 12, 2024.
“This Woman of Color Led a Groundbreaking New PrEP Study,” TheBody.com, June 24, 2024.
Moupali Das, MD, MPH, is Vice President, HIV Prevention and Virology Pediatric Clinical Development at Gilead Sciences. She is the Franchise Head for HIV Prevention and oversees Gilead’s landmark PURPOSE program, which is evaluating the efficacy and safety of lenacapavir for HIV prevention. In 2024, the unprecedented positive results from the PURPOSE 1 and PURPOSE 2 trials were published in The New England Journal of Medicine and led Science Magazine to name lenacapavir its 2024 “Breakthrough of the Year.”
Since joining Gilead Sciences, Moupali has leveraged her clinical HIV and ID expertise, clinical trial design and epidemiology skills, and passion for coaching and mentoring to build and lead high-performing cross-functional teams in HIV treatment and prevention. For the past approximately five years, Moupali has led the PURPOSE program and HIV Prevention Clinical Development with passion and empathy, revolutionizing how Gilead develops drugs, innovating in the science and in health equity, and laying the groundwork for global access. Her scholarly and intentional approach to clinical trial design and implementation with a focus on diversity and equity has been celebrated internally and externally by the scientific and advocacy community, as this brief profile on TheBody.com highlights: https://www.thebody.com/article/moupali-das-designed-len-study-with-black-brown-girls-in-mind
Moupali has committed her entire educational and professional career to HIV. After completing her A.B. in Biochemical Sciences at Harvard College, medical school and internal medicine residency training at Columbia University and New York Presbyterian Hospital, she came to University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) for fellowship training in Infectious Diseases and to University of California, Berkeley for her MPH in Epidemiology. She cared for HIV patients at San Francisco General’s storied Ward 86 clinic and attended on the inpatient ID Consult Service. Her research prior to joining Gilead included the development of a novel population-based indicator, community viral load (CVL), to evaluate the impact of treatment as prevention. Her CVL research was the basis for measuring CVL and using viral suppression to evaluate the effectiveness of the National HIV/AIDS Strategy (NHAS). She served on the Institute of Medicine Committee on Data Systems for Monitoring HIV/AIDS care. See here for a brief profile of Moupali’s pre-Gilead career: http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2012_07_13/caredit.a1200079
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