This position paper informs diverse stakeholders to advance HIV cure-directed research literacy by engaging potential study participants and their communities, HIV researchers, healthcare providers, funding agencies, and others looking to support HIV cure-directed research.
The product of a partnership among the BEAT-HIV Community Advisory Board (CAB), BEAT-HIV principal investigators, clinical researchers, and pioneering community health center Philadelphia FIGHT, this paper is written with the community in mind. It’s meant to clarify and demystify HIV cure-directed studies, especially those that employ an analytical treatment interruption (ATI).
We’ve taken a “trauma-informed approach” to health education, medical care, and HIV cure-directed research in developing this paper, as many people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) are impacted and burdened by lifetime individual- and community-level trauma.
Our hope is that cure-directed research will bring us closer to a strategy that will free patients from having to take a daily regimen of HIV medications and will provide relief to parts of the world where access to ART medications remains challenging.
