Lead image for New weekly HIV pill matches daily treatment in landmark global trial .
For the 1.4 million Kenyans on antiretroviral treatment, the routine is the same: take a tablet every day without fail, for the rest of their lives.
Most manage it. But managing it is not the same as finding it easy.
Researchers have now found what could be a simpler, less demanding option than anything currently available in HIV treatment: one pill taken once a week.
According to findings from the ISLEND-1 study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine on July 29, 2026, and presented the same week at the 26th International Aids Conference in Rio de Janeiro, the once-weekly pill kept the virus suppressed as effectively as the daily treatment.
The ISLEND-1 trial is a phase 3 clinical study, the gold standard of evidence required before a drug can be approved for widespread use. It was conducted across 106 sites in 12 countries between October 2024 and April 2025 and enrolled 607 adults with virologically suppressed HIV.
All participants had been taking the daily combination of bictegravir-emtricitabine-tenofovir alafenamide (B/F/TAF) for at least six months. The regimen is considered one of the most effective HIV treatments in the world, and all participants had undetectable levels of the virus in their blood.
Half of the participants switched to a once-weekly combination of islatravir and lenacapavir (ISL/LEN), while the other half remained on the daily B/F/TAF regimen. Both groups also received a matching placebo for the treatment they were not taking, meaning neither the participants nor the researchers knew who was receiving which regimen.
Islatravir is a nucleoside reverse-transcriptase translocation inhibitor, a class of drug that interferes with the reverse transcriptase enzyme HIV uses to replicate inside a cell. It targets the translation step of that process rather than the transcription step, giving it a distinct mechanism from older drugs in the same broad family.