4th International AIDS Society Conference on HIV Pathogenesis, Treatment and Prevention

The first IAS conference to highlight biomedical prevention was held in Sydney in July 2007

Over 5000 delegates from 133 countries met in Sydney in July for the 4th International AIDS Society Conference on HIV Pathogenesis, Treatment and Prevention, the first major international conference on the biomedical aspects of AIDS to be held in Australia. It was also the first conference in this series to include prevention in its title and to assign a central role to prevention research in the scientific program, alongside basic science and clinical research. Coinciding with the conference was the release of the Sydney Declaration, which calls for 10% of all resources devoted to HIV programming to be dedicated to research1 (Box). The conference provided Australia with an opportunity to benefit from the presence of world-leading scientists from a number of disciplines, as well as to showcase outstanding Australian achievements in HIV research.