AVAC in the News

About two thirds of women didn’t consistently use Gilead’s daily pill Truvada or Viread, which came in the form of a pill or vaginal gel, according to the study released yesterday at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Atlanta.

The failure was due not to the methods — two different pills and a vaginal gel — but to the fact that the women did not use them consistently.

"Perhaps the most important finding was that although women came back to the clinic every month and were dedicated to the trial, the majority of these women didn’t actually take the product in the end."

With a checkered past, marred by decades of missteps, dead ends, controversies and a repeated need to change the direction of research, the quest for a therapeutic HIV vaccine is charting a slow but dogged path.