VIDEO: HIV cure research ‘a little bit stalled’

Editor’s note: This is an automatically generated transcript. Please notify editor@healio.com if there are concerns regarding accuracy of the transcription.

I think the obvious is, one, we need a cure, and we're not very close. There's not a lot of data that shows we can cure people. There's one more that was added to the list of four cured patients. There's a fifth, the one they're calling the New Berlin case. It's another stem cell transplant. So we've got five people in the world who've been cured, and it was all with stem cell transplants with specific bone marrow that had Delta 32 mutations, such that the virus has trouble getting into the cells. So we would like to see more things like that, but it's going to take a while.

And cure research is sort of, in my opinion, a little bit stalled right now, and there wasn't a lot. Also, you're gonna have trouble doing a lot of cure research if we have such good prevention that anybody who wants it, could prevent them from getting infected by taking what we have to offer. So one is a cure, two are vaccines. Obviously, we'd love to have a vaccine. We've talked about having a vaccine for HIV for decades, and we don't have one. And again, it's gonna be harder to study vaccines as patients are able to access PrEP, pre-exposure prophylaxis. They're gonna probably not volunteer to go off of PrEP and be on a vaccine trial. So it's going to be more and more difficult as we get better at pre-exposure prophylaxis. So I would say that the two biggest unmet needs are cure, obviously, and vaccines.