Alumnus Dr. Dan Werb named Director and Scientific Board Chair of ICSDP

SPPH PhD alumnus Dr. Daniel Werb has been named Director and Scientific Board Chair of the International Centre for Science in Drug Policy (ICSDP), an international network of scientists seeking to improve the health and safety of communities and individuals affected by illicit drugs. Dr. Werb, a co-founder of the ICSDP, will operate the ICSDP out of its new headquarters in Toronto, within St. Michael’s Hospital.

Dr. Werb was also one of six researchers recently named an inaugural recipient of the Avenir Award, a prestigious US$1.5 million research grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

Avenir means “future” in French and the Avenir Award supports early-stage investigators who propose highly innovative studies for HIV/AIDS or genetics and epigenetics research. According to the National Institutes of Health, recipients are researchers who show promise of being tomorrow’s leaders in the field.

Dr. Werb’s Avenir Award-funded project is called PRIMER, which stands for Preventing Injecting by Modifying Existing Responses. The study will be carried out over five years by an international team of researchers across six cities: Vancouver; San Diego, Calif.; Tijuana, Mexico; and Paris, Marseille and Bordeaux, France.

PRIMER is the first to extend the HIV Treatment as Prevention® (TasP®) model – pioneered by the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS (BC-CfE) – in order to control the spread of addictive behaviours like injection drug use.