13th IAS Conference on HIV Science (IAS 2025): Introduction and early reports

21 July 2025. Related: Conference reports, Activism & advocacy, , .

Simon Collins, HIV i-Base

The 13th IAS Conference on HIV Science was held from 13–17 July 2025 in Kigali, Rwanda. It was also be a hybrid online meeting.

“Everything about this conference is political. Even the most exciting science cannot be separated from who it is going to really benefit…”

It is important and right that this meeting is again hosted in the Global South. However, changes this year in US policies on international aid are likely to impact on delegate numbers, even for those who are able to attend online.

This year is particularly difficult for community organisations, including i-Base. Much as we would much prefer to support and contribute to the meeting in person, our reports this year will be from the hybrid platform.

Much of the meeting will be rooted in the international crisis over global health, driven by changes in the US administration since 20 January this year. This was shown by the first four studies highlighted in the first press conference all being late-breaker abstracts on the impact of funding cuts (see below).

Expect to hear more about the outcome of these changes, where many people were already forced to stop ART and where prevention services, including access to condoms and testing, vanished overnight.

But also expect exciting science. This will include studies about promising new drugs to treat and prevent HIV and strategies to perhaps use fewer existing drugs, including whether some people can safely take ART on five rather than seven days a week.

There will be research on complications of HIV and treatment, practical studies about treatment access, political and social aspects of care and hopefully more information about the pathway to a cure.

All webcasts and presentations are already available online for conference delegates. These will become available to IAS members four weeks after the conference. Full open-access to everyone else will come eight weeks after the conference.

The full programme and abstract book are both available open access from the conference website. The opening and closing ceremonies and presentations should also be broadly available but these links have not yet been published.

Conference programme:
programme.ias2025.org

Abstract book:
https://www.iasociety.org/sites/default/files/IAS2025/abstract-book/IAS-2025_Abstracts_Medium.pdf

IAS and conference website:
www.iasociety.org

Further news about the conference, including likely highlights will be added to this page later, together with links to rapid reports.

Early reports

This post was first published on 3 July 2025 and will be updated frequently during the conference.

Links to other websites are current at date of posting but not maintained.