Expert Insights

A BIKTARVY® Information Exchange:
Topics About HIV Treatment

The treatment of HIV has been continually evolving over the past decades. Join leading HIV clinicians as they discuss crucial insights to HIV treatment and review the clinical data for BIKTARVY. Register for a webinar below to learn more about their experiences and strategies to help support patients.

Upcoming BIKTARVY Webinars

These non-CME educational programs and speakers are sponsored by Gilead Sciences, Inc.​

Digital Library

Real conversations logo.

Hear from key opinion leaders, Joel E. Gallant, MD, MPH, and Calvin J. Cohen, MD, MSc, as they discuss the events that shaped the way providers approach HIV treatment. Dr. Cohen is an employee of Gilead, and Dr. Gallant is a former employee of Gilead.

Contents

(0:04)

Introduction

(0:23)

HIV Impact

(0:50)

Dr. Gallant’s Story

(1:20)

Antiretrovirals

Transcript

Introduction [0:04]

I was a medical student, starting school in, here in San Francisco at UCSF in 1981. I recall being in medical school in the early ‘80s just about the beginning of when we started to hear this bad news grumbling about this mysterious illness that was killing young men.


HIV Impact [0:23]

You saw people on the streets who were emaciated covered with Kaposi sarcoma lesions with walkers. Death was everywhere. We had no idea what we were up against, we had no idea the size or shape of it if this was going to be temporary for a few months or what it obviously turned out to be.


Dr. Gallant’s Story [0:50]

For me as a, as a gay man who had been at risk and was untested, every day was terrifying. And, and so many of my patients were just reminders that they were no different than I was. In the early ‘90s, patients became friends, friends became patients, and...sometimes I don’t remember which, in which order that happened. But all of us had those patients.


Antiretrovirals [1:20]

It was the summer of 1996 and we were at yet another international AIDS conference this one in beautiful Vancouver, Canada. At that meeting, a few studies were presented to us that showed us something that the field hadn’t seen before, which was durable suppression of HIV for 48 weeks on a combination of three antivirals and at least acceptable toxicities. 1996 was a landmark year. We could now measure viral load and we could measure resistance. Instead of HIV winning and creating resistance to everything we threw at it, the antivirals were winning, we were winning. And we were able to stop HIV from growing and it wasn’t just for weeks, it was for a year. And it was exhilarating. I remember the first patient whose viral load came back undetectable. I had just gotten back from the Vancouver AIDS Conference. I remember getting that viral load report back, along with all my other stack of labs and it was the first time I had ever seen an undetectable viral load. And this guy was, he was a friend as well as a patient. I called him up and I said, “You’re not going to believe this, your viral load is undetectable.” And he started crying at work and then I started crying in my office and it was just tears of joy of course. And he’s still doing well to this day.

See Dr. Joel Gallant and Dr. Calvin Cohen discuss more HIV topics:

Watch Dr. Joel Gallant discuss the importance of remembering the basic principles of preventing resistance from early years of HIV treatment.
Watch Dr. Joel Gallant and Dr. Calvin Cohen discuss clinical, social, and community-level factors that influence the achievement of durable viral suppression.
Listen to Dr. Joel Gallant and Dr. Calvin Cohen as they reflect on the importance of early treatment initation and how it changed the conversation with their patients.
Watch how having conversations around treatment optimization can help providers and patients who are assessing their options.