‘Revolutionary’ HIV prevention jab set to expand choices for consumers

Researchers quickly recognized the potential of the long-term HIV prevention injectable, cabotegravir or CAB-LA. One of the key studies on the efficacy of the drug — which is a form of preexposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, used to prevent HIV infections — finished months ahead of schedule, as initial results showed the superiority of the injectable to a daily oral version of PrEP. CAB-LA only requires people to receive injections eight weeks apart after an introductory period.

Since that study ended in July 2020, researchers have been scrambling to fill in gaps in knowledge about how to safely administer CAB-LA to help ensure communities around the world gain access to a method that Sunil Solomon, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University, called “one of the most revolutionary breakthroughs in HIV prevention,” at last week’s Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections.

Presentation after presentation at this year’s CROI focused on how to ensure that CAB-LA reaches the people — particularly those in lower-income communities — who need it most. To do so, researchers are taking lessons from the slow rollout of oral PrEP, where some countries have struggled to raise awareness about the method or make the pills easily available to people.