Overview

As the director of the Pediatric HIV/AIDS Program at Children’s Hospital Oakland (CHO), Dr. Petru is dedicated to providing comprehensive care to children with HIV. This includes her role in the Northern California Pediatric AIDS Treatment Center, a collaboration between UCSF and CHO, where she helps to design and implement clinical trials and other treatment-related research for HIV-infected children.

Petru values the opportunity she has as a clinician to develop long-term relationships with patients and families affected by HIV. She assures them of researchers’ interest in the well-being of the child, and educates parents, caregivers, and child welfare officials of the potential benefits to HIV-infected children of participation in clinical trials for which they meet the enrollment criteria. As a result, over the past eleven years, more than 50 percent of the clinic’s patients have been participants in drug and combination-therapy trials.

In other treatment-related research, Petru and her colleagues assayed patients’ spinal fluid to investigate the penetration of the virus and various therapeutic agents into the central nervous system. The findings of this study were used to assess the degree of neurological complications in pediatric HIV, and the potential of current drug therapy to counteract it.

Other research projects now in progress are assessing the changes in body composition in pediatric patients at the time of and in response to changes in their antiretroviral treatment, and studies of long term complications of HIV in children.