With an estimated 2.5 million new HIV infections occurring globally each year, methods are urgently needed to better utilize existing HIV prevention strategies and to identify new ones. Though a variety of different biomedical interventions have recently been evaluated in late-stage trials, most have had disappointing results.

A new Institute of Medicine report, Methodological Challenges in Biomedical HIV Prevention Trials, discusses various ways to improve the design, monitoring, and analysis of late-stage randomized clinical trials of biomedical interventions to prevent HIV infection. The main goals are to increase the chances that these trials will detect a beneficial effect on HIV infection risk and to more fully assess how adherence to the intervention influences HIV infection risk, and to assess the intervention’s effect on HIV risk behavior.