Two years ago, at the 2023 STAT Summit in Boston, Dr. Kimberly Smith of ViiV Healthcare laid out five steps she saw as critical to end the HIV epidemic: Getting tested, finding treatment, taking pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), ensuring access, and eliminating stigma.
Since then, the HIV medical and research communities have made progress across all those steps — so much that in 2025, joining STAT again for its yearly summit, Smith has added a sixth to the list: cure.
“Innovation can move us forward even further,” said Smith, chief scientific officer and head of R&D at ViiV Healthcare, during an interview with STAT Brand Studio. “While cure is a really high bar, I do think that we’ve seen some things that start to make us think we might be moving in the right direction.”
Such developments include new tools like broadly neutralizing antibodies that could not only help control HIV, as antiretroviral therapy (ART) does, but might also reduce the viral reservoir — something ART cannot do and which remains a key barrier to achieving a functional cure. Other innovations include a new generation of long-acting therapies that help lessen the burden of HIV care.
And, after 40 years spent fighting this virus, researchers have hope that with continued momentum, a cure is finally within reach.
Progress is promising, but perception gaps remain
HIV innovation has been in a sprint over the past decade or so, churning out wins from PrEP to increased awareness to better education — a landscape that’s saving more than half the lives the virus once took. But in all the celebrations of this progress, Smith worries people assume the threat is already over.
“HIV is not a solved problem — far from it,” she said, adding that there are more than 30,000 new infections every year and more than 1 million people in the U.S. living with HIV currently. Globally, UNAIDS reports that the rate of HIV acquisition is rising in 28 countries. “We don’t talk about it a lot because people do think that it’s not a problem anymore. If we stop talking about it and we stop educating about it and we don’t talk about it to young folks, then we will not get to the end of this epidemic.”
In particular, experts like Smith want more people to talk about U=U, or “undetectable equals untransmittable.” If a person with HIV has their viral load controlled by treatment to undetectable levels, they’re unable to pass the virus to someone else. The benefits of that public knowledge are two-fold: It can help control current infections and prevent new ones.
“People living with HIV who are on effective treatment get to live a normal life,” Smith said. “They can have sexual partners without risking transmission, and women who are living with HIV who are on treatment can get pregnant and have babies that are not living with HIV.”
“It’s important that we talk about it,” she continued. “I would encourage people to just keep being educated … so that we can get to the end of this epidemic.”
Access that leaves no one behind
In what Smith calls the “bad old days” of HIV — when AIDS was the top cause of death for young and working-age adults — she says she lost many patients. She thinks about them regularly.
“What I wish is that those patients would have been able to have access to the medicines we have now,” she said, alluding to new classes of long-acting therapies that help more people live less tethered to their treatments. “I want to be able to make more of those therapies so we don’t lose folks the way that we did back in the old days.”
The continuing declines in HIV-related deaths show that these modern advancements are on track. But while innovations are ongoing, access concerns persist; epidemics aren’t cured until everyone benefits.
“There are roughly 41 million people around the world that are living with HIV,” she said. “Around 29 to 30 million of those people are on treatment. So that means a quarter of them are not. We’ve got to address that gap and make sure that we get to those people who aren’t on treatment.”
ViiV Healthcare has committed to narrowing those gaps by focusing on global efforts such as partnerships, flexible pricing, patent-free models, and voluntary licensing agreements that expand access in high-impact areas such as Sub-Saharan Africa, where most HIV infections occur.
“What gives me hope is the fact that we’ve been able to ramp up that pace,” Smith said. “Our company has made a commitment to making our medicines available regardless of people’s ability to pay around the world. Our mission is to leave no person living with HIV behind. And our commitment has meant that of the 29 to 30 million people that are on treatment, 25 million of them are on a ViiV-created drug.”
“We feel super proud of that.”
