Every four minutes, three young women will become infected with HIV—that’s close to 900,000 new infections a year. While HIV prevention research and drug development have progressed rapidly, there is still work to be done. This World AIDS Day, we reflect on our work to advance MPTs by asking the IMPT Advisory Council for their perspective on the role of MPTs in the fight to end the HIV epidemic.

Earlier this year, we wrote a post about Target Product Profiles (TPPs) and the generalized versions that the IMPT developed in 2015 for two MPT product types. As we argue in that post, a product that meets all clinical targets listed in a TPP will not necessarily correlate to its public health impact in the real world. That is, not unless we work to understand what the future end-users of MPTs – who include both the women who will use MPTs to protect their sexual and reproductive health as well as the health providers who will prescribe MPTs for these women – want and need in a product and then integrate those learnings into the product development process. Of course, it is critical that an MPT be efficacious and safe, but how can we expand the product evaluation process to better ensure that future end-users will be able to access, want to try, and continue to use an MPT?

We at Yaso Therapeutics are developing a vaginal gel, called Yaso-GEL, that uses a single proprietary drug to prevent pregnancy as well as genital herpes, gonorrhea, and chlamydia. The gel is mucoadhesive, non-irritating, relatively low-cost, and stable. Yaso-GEL aims to be an MPT that can fill the need for non-hormonal contraceptives and protect women from sexually transmitted infections (STIs).