They would contact Kathy Bones in the Infectious Disease Division. So, we work very closely with Mike Keefer and Kathy. So, Mike is the PI of the clinical trials unit which is the unit that obviously does those clinical trials, and Kathy is really the lead clinical coordinator and lead clinical person. Again, I talked a little bit about [inaudible] work, for example. So, that's clearly a behavioral or lifestyle intervention that's exercise. And while it may seem sort of obvious, again, getting people to actually exercise, getting them to understand that that's an important preventive aspect of their own health care. And having people sort of understand why that's important and more importantly, internalize that so they become driven by a self-motivation, not by the notion that, "My doctor says I have this so and so." That's not generally very effective. There are other interventions that are relevant or being pursued and maybe I'll pick up on two. One is just sort of a general comment which is that folks with HIV tend to have a very high rate of smoking as a group. So, smoking turns out to be not so good for you, and particularly in people whose underlying health is not all it could be. So, that's an important area for an intervention. Actually, there's more than one area. Another behavioral intervention is not so much with people living with HIV, but with people at risk. So, one of the things that's really changed in the last several years is our ability to offer pre-exposure prophylaxis or PrEP. And so, perhaps, very much a behavioral intervention. Right? It's the notion of taking a long lasting antiretroviral medication as a preemptive, particularly for individuals who may have high-risk sexual activity. And so, that's typically marketed to men who have sex with men. Not exclusively, there are other groups too that would be appropriate, but you're looking for individuals who are at high risk, who really feel that that would be the right approach for them. And that's turned out to be very successful and has had a really significant uptake in the community and had a profound effect on viral transmission because obviously, if you take PrEP, it works great. And there are some very interesting studies in the literature where the original trials were done when they might ask people, "Did you take your meds?" And they'll say, "Well, sure I did." And then you'll do a test in their blood to check if indeed the medications are on board and you'll discover that no, they didn't. And there's lots of reasons why that happens. In some societies, what happens is there's a notion that one, they're very social societies. People just share everything. So, if you give somebody antiretroviral meds, they give it to all their friends and they have no less left of themselves. In other cases, it's just human nature that you say things that you think will please your health care provider. They just don't happen to be true. And so, if you take PrEP and people who are really engaged and see it as important to their health, they will take PrEP. If you take it, it's very, very effective. And so, that's proved to be a very powerful modifier of health risk. One of the places it's going and this is both an alarming thing to say, in a sense, but also accurate is vaccine. So, the alarming part of that is that if you asked 30 years ago where should the field go, I would have said the same thing. The difference is that I think we're much more likely to get to a vaccine in the next 10 years. I think it will be an iterative process. I think that we may have an initial vaccine that's less than perfect and that will over time come up with improved versions of that vaccine. But I actually think that's going to change dramatically. And there's also a lot more interest in social and behavioral work in the field because really, as I was saying earlier, we have all of these antiretroviral medicines. We know they work well and yet, the majority of people even in this country do not have adequately suppressed viral load. So, there's a disconnect between what we have available to help people and getting people to the point where we are in fact helping them. And so, clearly, that's a big social behavioral piece. Uptake of things like PrEP, new interventions that we have that we know work that again actually falls in the area of social and behavioral work. There's also basic science work. There are a lot of things about HIV we still don't understand. I would say that if you look at the population now within the next few years, it'll reach the point where more than half of people with HIV are over 50. And obviously, as time goes on, that's just going to increasingly be the case. So, I would say the area of sort of aging in HIV is a very important area that's not terribly well-understood for fairly obvious reasons that most people haven't reached those older age, some have but most haven't. And so, understanding that better and knowing what is going to be effective in terms of interventions is also very important. So, those are some of the areas but there's always actually a lot of different areas. It turns out there's a lot we don't know. Maybe the other thing to say is, one of the things that people don't always appreciate about HIV/AIDS work is how much of the work done on HIV AIDS has turned out to be very important for other diseases. So, for example the medications we have for Hep C, I mean, that's a remarkable story and those are based on the same scientific concept that produce the HIV protease inhibitors. So, back in the mid-90s, the protease inhibitors came along and they transformed HIV care. They took us to the point where we have this highly effective drug cocktail that we can give people. With HIV, we still don't know how to eradicate the virus. That's another area of a lot of interest. Can you cure HIV infection or can you at least turn it into a state where the virus is dormant, completely dormant for a very long time? So, coming up with a very long lasting antiretrovirals or ways to eliminate the virus. But in the case of Hep C, just a sort of circle back to that thought, Hep-C, we actually have medicines that can wipe it out which is amazing. And those medicines were developed with the same technologies and the same insights that came from the HIV field. And there are a lot of other examples of other things that were done first in HIV and have then been applied to other diseases or the knowledge that we gained has turned out to be very valuable than other contexts and I think sometimes that's underappreciated. The goal would be that I should be unemployed or at least unemployed in the HIV side of my life. That would be a really wonderful situation to be in. Right? That we have controlled HIV to the extent that the disease is effectively wiped out. That really is the goal. If we have a vaccine, I think we will be much, much closer to that goal. And I would love to say, "Well, I used to work on HIV and I spent a lot of my life working on that, but now I don't and I have to work on something else because we fixed HIV." That to me would be the absolute best possible thing that I could say.
