Federal grants totaling $24 million will fund a network of three research centers and a data coordinating center dedicated to young people with HIV or at risk of contracting it, with a focus on mobile applications.

Called the Adolescent Medicine Trials Network for HIV/AIDS Interventions (ATN), the project is being funded through National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) within the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

“Most new HIV infections occur in young people,” said Bill G. Kapogiannis, MD, network co-director and medical officer at NICHD. “Many in this population go a long time before they find out they have HIV and often do not get the care they need.”

The goal, Kapogiannis said, is to get adolescents and young adults at risk of passing the virus on to future partners into care. ATN will allow them to participate in research trials and studies conducted at the new centers.

The three leadership hubs will be led by a total of six principal investigators: Mary Jane Rotheram-Borus, PhD, of the University of California, Los Angeles; Lisa Hightow-Weidman, MD, of the University of North Carolina (UNC); Patrick Sullivan, MD, of Emory University; Sylvie Naar-King, PhD, of Wayne State University; Bonita Stanton, PhD, of Seton Hall University, and Jeffrey Parsons, PhD, of Hunter College in New York.

UNC and Emory will be partnering to develop mobile applications to increase HIV testing among at-risk youth, along with “electronic health interventions” to encourage HIV positive patients to adhere to their antiretroviral therapy.

“Despite recommendations that high risk youth receive an HIV test at least annually, many (young men who have sex with men) have not been tested in the last year and more than half of youth with HIV are unaware of their infection,” Hightow-Weidman said. “Barriers to testing among youth include misperception of individual risk, fear of testing positive, concerns about confidentiality and access to healthcare services. Developing interventions to improve the uptake of HIV testing and facilitate entry into prevention and care services is the goal of our…studies.”

UNC’s Gillings School of Public Health will serve as the data coordinating center for the research network.

Data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in November 2015 said an estimated 9,731 youth between the ages of 13 and 24 were diagnosed with HIV in 2014, with around 57,000 between the ages of 18 and 24 living with the disease in 2012.

Younger HIV positive patients had the lowest rates of being linked to care and being been prescribed HIV medications, according to the CDC. Young people as a whole were at an increased risk of contracting the virus thanks to higher rates of substance abuse, lower rates of testing and condom use, and fewer schools teaching HIV prevention techniques.