The Philippines AFRIMS Virology Research Units in Cebu City and Manila as an advanced development site for military medical solutions, conducting disease surveillance as well as diagnostic and vaccine development. In addition, PAVRU serves as training site for visiting military researchers and physicians. PAVRU houses biologic specimen processing (including PBMC isolation) and storage areas including biosafety level II cabinets, ultra-low temperature freezers, refrigerated centrifuges and IP refrigerators. The laboratory has the capability to perform detection by PCR of arbo- and respiratory viruses and bioinformatics analysis.
Over the past 12 years, PAVRU-Cebu’s research projects include Sentinel Human Surveillance for Influenza in Cebu, a dengue virus project aimed to find the sero-epidemiological etiology of dengue-like illnesses in a tertiary hospital in Cebu City, and two Phase 3 clinical trials of approximately 2,000 subjects including a study to determine the safety and efficacy of a novel, tetravalent dengue vaccine. Over the past eight years, approximately 900-1500 study volunteers visited PAVRU annually.
PAVRU-Manila has played an important role in furthering the understanding of the epidemiology and pathophysiology of various infectious diseases in environments unique to military populations. PAVRU-Manila was the first to detect the influenza pandemic H1N12009 strain among Philippine military personnel and was critical to its containment in Armed Forces Philippines military camps.
PAVRU supports several bacterial surveillance studies as well. Major research activities include surveillance of etiologic agents causing acute and chronic infectious diarrhea, a study of wound microbial flora among patients in a Philippine military hospital and monitoring of multidrug-resistant N. gonorrhea and other organisms. As a part of ongoing surveillance, PAVRU identified colistin-resistant E. coli isolates with the mcr-1 gene, pan-drug resistant Acinetobacter baumannii and carbapenem-resistant Shigella and Salmonella isolates.