Media statement

Head of AIDS Research at the South African Medical Research Council, Dr Gita Ramjee, receives Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2012 International Microbicide Conference in Sydney, Australia

Sydney, Australia, 18th April 2012: The MRC congratulates Dr Gita Ramjee on this richly deserved honour. Professor Abdool Karim, President of the MRC, paid tribute to Dr Ramjee, “Dr Ramjee has played an important international role in microbicide research.  She has been at the forefront of clinical trials to test microbicides, an HIV prevention strategy that seeks to empower women.  Dr Ramjee’s contributions, and that of her MRC research team, to this field of AIDS prevention, have brought great honour to South African science.”

The Lifetime Achievement Award for microbicide research is a major accolade for the MRC’s research on AIDS prevention, as this award is only made to those who have made a sustained contribution to the field of HIV Prevention. Dr Ramjee has over almost two decades made major contributions to global scientific knowledge in the field of HIV prevention and has been directly involved in testing more than 7 different candidate microbicides.

Dr Ramjee has been investigating women-initiated HIV prevention options since the availability of the first candidate, nonoxynol-9, more than 15 years ago. She has been the principal investigator for several large scale clinical trials of HIV prevention methods for women. Among them the nonoxynol-9 gel (COL-1492), vaginal diaphragm for HIV prevention, Carraguard gel, cellulose sulphate gel and PRO2000 gel. More recently, she has been conducting large scale trials of antiretroviral-based oral and topical prophylaxis.

Dr Ramjee obtained her science degree at the University of Sunderland, United Kingdom and her Masters and PhD through the Department of Paediatrics, University of KwaZulu-Natal. She is also an Honorary Professor at the University of Tamil Nadu, India and at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

The award was presented at the International Microbicide Conference in Sydney this week to Dr Ramjee and Dr Lut Van Damme from FHI 360 in North Carolina, USA.  Both Dr Van Damme and Dr Ramjee started their careers in microbicides in 1995 working on the same study - the COL-1492 trial. Dr Henry Gabelnick, Executive Director of CONRAD, presented the awards and said, “As a former recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award, it is a huge honour to present this year’s award to Drs Van Damme and Ramjee. I have had the pleasure of working closely with both of them over the past challenging decade. Their personal integrity and commitment to the HIV prevention field has been most valuable.”

Dr Ramjee said that she was honoured to receive the Award and recognition, “given that both Lut and I have spent most of our lives working on HIV prevention, receiving this lifetime award together is a great honour”. “Through the conduct of multiple trials, I have learnt a lot about women’s lives and the complexity of HIV prevention as it spans across various disciplines such as social, behavioural and clinical.  We have also forged partnerships with many International organizations, have gained donor and sponsor confidence and most importantly we have had the support of communities and participants in each of the areas we work in. She said that conducting HIV prevention research would not have been possible without the support of her team at the HIV prevention Research Unit in Durban and colleagues from the South African Medical Research Council”.