Salim S. Abdool Karim is a South African public health physician, epidemiologist and virologist who has played a leading role in the AIDS and COVID-19 pandemic. His scientific contributions have impacted the landscape of HIV prevention and treatment, saving thousands of lives.
Career Karim is a professor at both the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, and Columbia University in the United States. He was involved in the study.UKZN. "CAPRISA Trial Scoops USAID Award "Breakthrough Microbicide Gel Prevents HIV and Herpes in Women" , University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 31 January 2014. Retrieved on 27 September 2014.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Karim was chosen to lead a 45-person Ministerial Advisory Committee. The committee was intended to guide the South African government's response to the pandemic, and included several other medical experts. He was elected to be the Vice President for Outreach and Engagement of the International Science Council from 2021 to 2024 at the ISC General Assembly on 14 October 2021.
Education A second-generation South African of Indian heritage, he was born in 1960 in Durban and attended primary school in the Durban city centre before his family was forcibly relocated under apartheid’s racial Group Areas Act from Durban to Chatsworth, a racially segregated township in the south of the city. After completing high school in Durban in 1977, he attended the University of Natal’s medical school. Unable to afford university fees, he had to scrap his original plan to study engineering when he could secure scholarship funding only to study medicine. Despite this setback, he obtained a student loan whilst at medical school to concurrently study computer science and statistics via correspondence at the University of South Africa. Under the mentorship of pediatrician Jerry Coovadia, he conducted his first research project as a third-year medical student, leading to his first publication, a paper in the International Journal of Health Services. This publication highlighted several racial disparities in health status during apartheid.
Medical training In 1984, he completed his Internship at King Edward VIII Hospital, Durban, followed by an MRC research fellowship. He then joined the Department of Virology at the University of Natal in 1986, to start his doctoral research on Hepatitis B viral infection. He trained in Virology when it was not a recognized medical specialty but was subsequently awarded an Honorary Fellowship in Virology by the College of Medicine of South Africa in recognition of his seminal contributions in this discipline.
In mid-1987, he went to New York on a Rockefeller fellowship to pursue a master's degree in epidemiology at Columbia University. In January 1988, he returned briefly to South Africa to marry Quarraisha Khan, a molecular biologist. During 1988, he also studied health economics at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and methods of epidemic investigations at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, USA. He returned to South Africa at the end of 1988 to contribute through research to addressing the burgeoning HIV epidemic in South Africa. This initiated his life-long collaboration with Quarraisha Abdool Karim, his wife, beginning their first joint study in 1989, which was one of the earliest community-based HIV surveys undertaken in Africa.
In 1992, he started his specialist training in public health, completing his Fellowship in Public Health Medicine with the College of Medicine, South Africa, while simultaneously graduating with a Masters in Medicine degree in Community Health from the University of Natal. In 1999, he obtained a PhD in medicine from the University of Natal, based on his research on the epidemiology of Hepatitis B Virus infection in South Africa.
Research career In 1985, he spent a year post-internship conducting research at the SAMRC. In 1992, he joined the SAMRC as a senior epidemiologist and was appointed Director of the MRC's Centre for Epidemiological Research in South Africa (CERSA) in 1993. During his tenure, he built CERSA up as the largest medical research organization in South Africa, enabling it to play a leading role in public health, both locally and globally. Almost a decade later, he decided to switch to a leadership position in higher education, taking up the position of Deputy Vice-Chancellor of research at the University of Natal in 2001. Following the post-apartheid merger of the Universities of Natal and Durban Westville in 2004, he developed and implemented a new research strategy for the newly formed University of KwaZulu-Natal with a focus on African scholarship.
Karim is widely recognized for his visionary and bold leadership in conceptualizing and creating research institutions in South Africa. During his tenure at the MRC and the University of KwaZulu-Natal, he created five new successful research centres – building research infrastructure and capacity in South Africa. He was the Principal Investigator of the grants that created the Wellcome Trust-funded Africa Centre for Population Studies and Reproductive Health in 1997, and the MRC's HIV Prevention and Vaccine Research Unit in 2000 with a $16million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). In 2002, he secured a $15 million NIH grant to create the Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa (CAPRISA). He led the teams that established LifeLab, a $10 million biotechnology research centre in 2003 and the $70 million KwaZulu-Natal Research Institute for TB and HIV (K-RITH), funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, in 2007. Karim served as the founding director of four of these five research institutes and, in LifeLab, as its founding board chair.
Key research contributions Karim's main research interests are in HIV prevention, treatment of HIV-TB co-infection, as well as the epidemiology and prevention of COVID-19.
The CAPRISA 004 tenofovir gel trial, which he co-led with Quarraisha Abdool Karim, provided the first evidence for the concept of antiretroviral pre-exposure prophylaxis against HIV infection. In 2012, this finding was heralded by the UNAIDS and WHO as one of the most significant scientific breakthroughs in the fight against AIDS and has been ranked among “The Top 10 Scientific Breakthroughs of 2010” by Science. This study also discovered that tenofovir gel prevents herpes simplex virus type 2 infection in women, which is the first biological prevention agent against genital herpes.
He also led the team that provided the empiric evidence for the “Cycle of HIV Transmission” where young girls are most often infected by men about 10 years older. These findings provided the evidence for the UNAIDS Report “Get on the Fast-Track – The Life-Cycle approach to HIV”, which has influenced the HIV response in several African countries and is listed as the highest priority in the current South African National AIDS Plan.
In the field of HIV vaccines, he is co-inventor on patents that are part of HIV vaccine candidates, as well as CAP256V2LS, a highly potent broadly neutralizing antibody that is being developed for passive immunization as a prelude to future HIV vaccine development.
His research on HIV-TB treatment was adopted in the WHO treatment guidelines of this co-infection and has been implemented in most countries. These significant findings have had a marked impact on HIV prevention and HIV-TB treatment in Africa and globally.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, his most impactful contributions focused on the public health and clinical implications of SARS-CoV-2 variants.
Karim's scientific contributions include over 520 peer-reviewed journal publications. He is co-editor of an Epidemiology textbook (Oxford University Press), a book on HIV/AIDS in South Africa (Cambridge University Press) and a book on HIV Clinical Trials (Springer). He has received grants as Principal Investigator in excess of $200 million, including grants from the NIH, Wellcome Trust, USAID, US CDC and Prevention, European Union, South African Department of Science and Technology and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
He is one of the world's most highly cited researchers – being listed from 2018 to 2022 on the Web of Science’s Clarivate Analytics annual list of the world's six thousand most influential researchers by citations in the sciences and social sciences. His most highly cited journal article, jointly first-authored with Quarraisha Abdool Karim (Science 2010; 329: 1168–1174), exceeds 2000 citations.
He has made a significant contribution to scientific capacity building and training as co-principal investigator with Quarraisha Abdool Karim of the Fogarty International Centre funded AIDS-TB training programme for a decade. More than 600 researchers from several countries in southern Africa have been trained in AIDS and TB research through this programme.
Affiliations He is director and Yusuf Hamied Chair in Global Health of the Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa (CAPRISA) and CAPRISA Professor of Global Health in Epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. He is also Pro Vice-Chancellor (Research) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, Adjunct Professor of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at Harvard University, Boston and adjunct professor of medicine at the Weill Cornell Medicine of Cornell University, New York."Eminent Scientist recognised for Exceptional Contribution to Science" , CAPRISA - News & Events, Durban, 2014. Retrieved on 27 September 2014.
As Director of CAPRISA, he is also the Director of 4 research centres hosted within CAPRISA. He is the Director of the UNAIDS Collaborating Centre for HIV Research and Policy, the Centre of Excellence in HIV Prevention of the South African National Research Foundation, a Centre of Excellence of the Global Virus Network and a South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC) extramural research unit for HIV-TB Pathogenesis and Treatment.
During his tenure as President of the SAMRC from 2012 to 2014, he led the turnaround of an 800-person organization in serious decline by redefining its strategic mission, enhancing organizational efficiencies, increasing its budget three-fold and raising its research impact and international stature. The February 2014 issue of Nature Medicine acknowledged and described how he turned a “moribund” MRC around with “visionary leadership”.
Scientific advice and policy contributions Karim has made major contributions to AIDS and COVID-19 policies, both in Africa and globally. He has provided scientific advice in AIDS, COVID-19 and global health to several governments as well as international agencies such as the WHO, ISC, UNAIDS, PEPFAR and the Global Fund to fight AIDS, TB and Malaria. He is on the 9-member WHO Science Council, that provides scientific advice to the WHO Director-General. He was the Chair of the UNAIDS Scientific Expert Panel, that provided scientific advice to the executive director of UNAIDS. He served as a member of the UNAIDS-Lancet Commission on “Defeating AIDS”, co-authoring its 2015 report in the Lancet, that mapped out a future direction for the global AIDS response. He is currently a member of the Scientific Advisory Board for Global Health at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and a member of the WHO HIV-TB Task Force. More recently, he has been contributing to COVID-19 policies and served as the Chair of the South African Ministerial Advisory Committee on COVID-19 and as a Member of the Africa Task Force for Coronavirus, The Africa Task Force on COVID-19 and the Lancet Commission on COVID-19.