This New Drug Could Help End the HIV Epidemic—but US Funding Cuts Are Killing Its Rollout

After a lifetime on the frontiers of the fight against HIV, Linda-Gail Bekker could finally see the end of the epidemic in sight. For decades, HIV experts had dreamed of an elusive vaccine to block the ongoing chain of infections, which still sees more than 1 million people worldwide contract the virus annually. Bekker, a 62-year-old medical professor from the University of Cape Town, had helped identify a drug that could do just that. But now, thanks to the Trump administration’s executive orders, it’s unclear when—or possibly even ever—this breakthrough medicine will see the light of day. At the AIDS 2024 conference held in Munich last July, Bekker had triumphantly unveiled the results of a momentous clinical trial she had led, called PURPOSE 1. It showed that lenacapavir, an antiretroviral developed by the pharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences, could prevent sexual transmission of HIV with 100 percent efficacy by disrupting the function of the virus’s capsid protein, which allows ... Read full article.