At CROI 2018 we heard stories, saw new data, and had lots of questions about early PrEP rollout. On Wednesday, April 18th, AVAC and partners from Jilinde in Kenya and PZAT in Zimbabwe explored valuable resources for people working to deliver oral PrEP. See below for some of the tools and resources we will explored and discussed during the webinar.

• Country Updates and the Global PrEP Tracker provide the status of PrEP.
• A Framework For Scaling Up PrEP provides step-by-step guidance for introducing PrEP into new settings.
• PrEP Resources aims to be a central repository for materials currently being used by programs—in areas such as global guidance; national policies and guidelines; M&E; training curricula; advocacy; implementation; and demand creation.

All of these materials (and many more) can be found on PrEPWatch.org, the clearinghouse for oral PrEP efforts across the globe.

Recording: YouTube / Audio / Slides

Hundreds of people tuned in to hear researchers discuss the available data on “time to protection” required for effective oral PrEP with TDF/FTC—i.e., how many doses must be taken to build up protective levels of the drug in the blood? The answer is—it varies. Not surprisingly then, so do the guidelines for PrEP use.

As webinar participants learned, the data are varied and subject to interpretation. The World Health Organization (WHO) and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommend different time frames to reach protection in their respective guidelines for oral PrEP use. Both of these recommendations are based on measurements of the amount of drug that accumulates in blood and/or tissue over a specific period of time. The studies of how drugs are taken into the body and how they leave the body is called “pharmacokinetics” and “pharmacodynamics” or “PK” and “PD” for short, as explained in our primer for advocates. There isn’t a single PK measurement that is associated with PrEP protection—so both WHO and CDC guidelines are based on inference.

AVAC hosted a follow-on webinar presentation where representatives from both the CDC and WHO reviewed their respective guidance development processes and the role, use, contexts and audience for guidance documents.

Watch the recording on YouTube, listen to an mp3 version or download the slides. Q&A starts approximately 55 minutes in.

The US CDC estimates that nearly 500,000 women in the US could benefit from using PrEP. But women’s uptake of PrEP is small compared to men’s because most women who might want it have never even heard of it. One of the most effective ways to raise most women’s awareness of PrEP is to get their health care providers (usually family planning clinics) talking to them about PrEP.

In this webinar we explored the education that needs to be done among those health care providers to make this happen and what is being done to be prioritize it, especially by federal agencies, state and local health departments.

Surveys and focus groups conducted with women demonstrate few women know about PrEP as an effective HIV prevention method and women are interested in learning more about PrEP as a potential option for themselves.

Join HIVE for a 1-hour discussion via Google Hangouts.

Participants learned about:

• Health care access
• PrEP guidelines
• Who is falling through the gaps?
• Bias/stigma from provider and/or community
• Engaging in a conversation about PrEP
• Assessing risk
• Community mobilization around PrEP and prevention
• Shifting community norms around PrEP and queer sexuality

For more information, contact [email protected]. The flyer is available for download below.

The PrEP Access & Engagement Training was hosted by BTAN Bay Area and the Black AIDS Institute. Health care access, PrEP guidelines, how to engage in a conversation about PrEP, community mobilizing around PrEP and prevention and much more were discussed.

Heard about a “tail” for long-acting injectables and want to know more? Interested in the timeline for when people with HIV might have injectable drug options for treatment? Wondering how people felt about getting an injection for PrEP? David Margolis (ViiV Healthcare) and Marty Markowitz (Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center) spoke about long-acting injectable antiretrovirals for treatment and prevention.

Click for the slides and an audio recording. A link to the Flash animation is below.

At CROI, Margolis presented findings from the LATTE 2 trial, which tested a pair of long-acting injectables—cabotegravir (from ViiV Healthcare) and rilpivarine (from Janssen)—for HIV maintenance therapy, and Markowitz presented findings from the ÉCLAIR paste 2A study of cabotegravir in HIV-uninfected men.

And this webinar is part of our post-2016 CROI webinar series. Click for more information.

The goal of the BTAN National Meeting was to engage BTAN members, co-chairs, and prospective members in capacity-building and best practice sharing workshops. In addtion to learning about the Seek, Test, Treat, and Retain model, the conference aimed to facilitate dialogue about the socio-contextual issues associated with seeking, testing, treating, and retaining African American and other Black people in HIV care. Additionally, the BTAN delegates reported on their BTAN workplans, gaining critical feedback from their peers.