Diane Havlir, MD, and Chris Beyrer, MD, MPH, co-authored a perspective that appears in today’s New England Journal of Medicine.

Havlir is a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and the chief of the UCSF Division of HIV/AIDS and Positive Health Program at San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center. She served as co-chair of AIDS 2012, the XIX international AIDS Conference.

Here is an excerpt from the NEJM perspective:

We are at a moment of extraordinary optimism in the response to the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). A series of scientific breakthroughs, including several trials showing the partial efficacy of oral and topical chemoprophylaxis1,2 and the first evidence of efficacy for an HIV vaccine candidate,3 have the potential to markedly expand the available preventive tools. There is evidence of the first cure of an HIV-infected person. And most important, the finding that early initiation of antiretroviral therapy can both improve individual patient outcomes and reduce the risk of HIV transmission to sexual partners by 96%4 has led many to assert what had so long seemed impossible: that control of the HIV pandemic may be achievable.

Read the full perspective in the New England Journal of Medicine.