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hiv and oral health

HIV & Oral Health: Short Bites November 2024

By: Mark Schweizer, DDS MPH
Director of Development and Special Projects
Dental Director Southeastern AIDS Training and Education Center
Nova Southeastern University College of Dental Medicine
[email protected]

Can we eliminate the HIV epidemic?

It’s a question that dates to the start of the epidemic in the 1980s. With 1.3 million new infections a year, the epidemic continues, and the world is not on track to meet the ambitious U.N. goal of ending HIV/AIDS by 2030.

But now there’s rising optimism among leading infectious disease experts after the latest groundbreaking clinical trial results for a drug called lenacapavir, which have shown it to be capable of virtually eliminating new HIV infections through sex.

The latest trial sponsored by Gilead Sciences, the California-based maker of lenacapavir, found the drug to be 96% effective in preventing HIV infections in the newly released results of a clinical trial involving more than 3,200 cisgender men, transgender men, transgender women, and gender non-binary individuals who have sex with partners assigned male at birth. The study was conducted across sites in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Peru, South Africa, Thailand, and the United States.

These results follow equally dramatic findings from a previous lenacapavir trial called PURPOSE 1, which followed 5,300 cisgender women in South Africa and Uganda. In news that headlined July’s AIDS 2024 conference in Munich, early results indicated 100% efficacy after Gilead Sciences revealed that not a single woman who had received the drug since the trial began in August 2021 had contracted HIV.

The burden of taking daily medicine varies for each individual and may be perceived as an even greater burden for healthy people who feel fine,” says Weld. “The finding that twice-yearly injections have high efficacy in preventing HIV lowers the amount that an individual has to do over the course of a lifetime to protect themselves. It puts lenacapavir much closer to the domain of other preventive paradigms, such as vaccination.

Approval and access always present challenges. The cost of treatment can exceed $40,000 per year. If everyone at risk could receive this prophylaxis, it could alter the course of the epidemic within a few years. When you substantially decrease the transmission rate, the epidemic can wane.

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