> Right, but how exactly are they making a surgery/implant kind of thing safe and cost-effective in this area? Same way a vaccine becomes cost-effective, I'd i

> Right, but how exactly are they making a surgery/implant kind of thing safe and cost-effective in this area? Same way a vaccine becomes cost-effective, I'd imagine. The article is paywalled, but from what I can tell, they're using Truvada, so the research is specifically for the method of delivery, not developing the drug itself, which cuts the overhead costs dramatically. Stents[0] aren't expensive per se; the expensive part is installing them. But if that only needs to be done every six months, and if it can be done by an RN or NP, then the cost of delivery starts to fall quickly as well. The main question I have is why they're heading down a fairly different road (subdermal implant) as opposed to a vaccine, since as far as I know, Gilead is already developing the latter. There must be more to this story than what I can find on the WSJ stub and the Quartz article. [0] This isn't actually a stent, but it looks like it'll be something similar