The Promise, Progress of PrEP

Both here in the United States and internationally, pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) is increasingly being seen as a valuable treatment option for HIV prevention.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has recommended offering oral PrEP to anyone at substantial risk of HIV as part of combination prevention strategy.

According to a study published in The Lancet HIV, there was a global increase in PrEP use, but fell short of targets. The study analyzed data on the adoption of WHO PrEP recommendation and numbers of PrEP users from 2016-2019 and forecasted numbers of PrEP users through 2023.

The study found that there were 626,000 PrEP users in 77 countries in 2019, after two-thirds of countries (120) had adopted WHO recommendations into national guidelines. This was a 69% increase from 370,000 PrEP users across 66 countries in 2018, when 30 countries had adopted the recommendations, but fell short of a goal of 3 million oral PrEP users by 2020 set by the UN General Assembly in 2016.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as many as 1.1 million Americans could benefit from PrEP, including 175,000 women and 780,000 people of color. Yet, statistics on usage remains low compared to the prospective benefactors. According to AIDSVu, there were only 77,120 PrEP users in the US in 2016.

The development of various forms of PrEP such as different oral therapies as well as long-acting injectables have been in development and working their way through clinical trials and also federal government approvals.

For example, ViiV Healthcare announced in late September that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted Priority Review for a New Drug Application (NDA) for cabotegravir, for an HIV prevention indication. The review is expected to be in late January 2022.

With so much going on in this area of HIV prevention, review the slideshow to understand more about where PrEP is in the treatment spectrum.