How Much Should an HIV Cure Cost?

Blogpost from the Joint IAS Working Group Meeting in Melbourne

Joseph D. Tucker, MD, PhD

Photo credit: Fsecart (Licensed through Flickr Creative Commons)

Imagining a non-toxic HIV cure becomes available, what is an appropriate price that would ensure access among a range of marginalized HIV-infected individuals across low, middle, and high-income country settings? This thorny question was one of the many posed by the Joint Working Group Meeting at the International AIDS Society’s conference in Melbourne, Australia recently. The International AIDS Society (IAS) has played a key leadership role in marshalling efforts towards a cure. On July 21^st, 2014, two separate working groups from the IAS – the psychosocial studies group and the cost-effectiveness working group – held a joint meeting. There were two main purposes of this meeting: 1) to bring participants up to date with ongoing research conducted in these two areas; 2) to consider shared areas of interest for potential collaborative research moving forward. Although still in their early phases, there are ongoing social science research projects focused on HIV cure underway in China, South Africa, the United States, France, and the United Kingdom. Cost-effectiveness research on various HIV cure strategies is also moving forward.

This brings us back to the original question about the cost (and value) of HIV cure research. Would a highly costly HIV cure strategy be able to reach the key affected populations (men who have sex with men, transgender individuals, sex workers, people who inject drugs) for whom this type of intervention may have the greatest significance? Or, as others have argued, are discussions of a future HIV cure cost premature given the state of current science? The example of newly developed hepatitis C cures suggests that earlier discussions about cure cost may be useful to ensure early access. Rigorous social science generally (our working group paper here) and public policy research in particular (working group team member Ben Meier’s abstract here) may help inform these discussions.