Reflecting on 40 years of progress against HIV

As the world marks the 40th anniversary of the first reports of what would later be known as HIV/AIDS, I had a few moments to reflect on my own life-long mission to eliminate HIV from the world. The first time I was confronted with HIV was in Kinshasa in 1983, when I was doing my first clinical training as a medical student in Hospital Mama Yemo. Patients in the hospital had a life expectancy of two to six months. There was not much we could do except treat opportunistic infections whenever possible.

 But my mentor, Dr. Paul Janssen, had the vision that one day, we would be able to treat HIV with just one pill, once a day. It took the scientific community more than 20 years to reach this goal. We learned about HIV breakthrough and multi-drug resistance, and found new drug targets, leading to therapies that could provide life-long suppression of the virus. Today, we have combination medicines, many as one daily pill, and we’re going even further to develop long-acting injectable treatments.

 Forty years of exceptional collaboration between academics, clinicians, industry scientists, regulators, NGOs and patient advocates has transformed HIV into a manageable chronic condition. Funding from national governments, financing through PEPFAR, The Global Fund and other financing mechanisms has led to availability of medicines for the majority of infected patients. Yet, HIV remains one of the biggest global health challenges of our time, with 38 million people in the world living with HIV and 1.7 million people newly infected every year.

To eradicate HIV, more is needed. Over the years, education as well as oral pre-exposure prophylaxis have been important prevention methods. But we will not end HIV without a preventive vaccine. In collaboration with The National Institutes of Health, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and other partners, Johnson & Johnson is conducting Phase II and III clinical trials to evaluate an HIV vaccine candidate. 

Even as the world focuses tremendous resources in the battle against COVID-19, we cannot get complacent in the fight against the HIV epidemic. For the people living with HIV, we need to continue develop and make available better medicines. For people at risk of being infected with HIV, we must do the research needed to develop the ultimate approaches for prevention.

In short, as we mark 40 years of HIV, we can be incredibly proud of the tremendous achievements made, but the work is not done. Let us keep working together to make HIV history.