May 2026:

ViiV Healthcare, the global specialist company in HIV care, has ranked #1 for the 13th consecutive year in the PatientView Corporate Reputation of Pharma survey. As per the 2025/26 survey, the company ranks #1 across all patient-defined reputation indicators including: patient centricity, information and safety; engagement in R&D; benefit of products; access to medicines; transparency in pricing and clinical data; and patient group relations.

Given the company’s consistently high rankings in the Corporate Reputation of Pharma Survey, PatientView recently spoke with Ama Appiah, Patient Affairs Lead, at ViiV Healthcare. In this Q&A, gain deeper insights into how the company partners with over 200 patient groups globally to inform their work across R&D, access to medicines and how it develops plans for the future.

“As the only global pharma company 100% dedicated to treating, preventing and

curing HIV, we remain committed to patient and community partnerships that drive

better outcomes and progress towards our shared goal of making HIV history for everyone.

How does ViiV embed patient voices in research and development?”

Patient engagement is at the heart of everything we do at ViiV, and we’re committed to ensuring the voice of the patient is embedded across our whole medicine development lifecycle.

“We know there isn’t a ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution to HIV care – each person is unique,

and each experience important. That’s why no one makes more effort to listen to,

understand and tackle the problems faced by populations impacted by HIV than we do.”

By seeking patient input during early product development, we have gained a better understanding of unmet health needs, aspirations, and preferences for future medicines. This has been invaluable in supporting our pipeline priorities and as a result our R&D teams are laser focused on developing the next generation of HIV innovation that patients tell us they want and need. This includes extending dosing durations, long-acting options for people to treat at home and ultimately finding a cure.

Patient insights also inform how we design our clinical trials to better meet the needs of the communities we serve. In the US we include the community voice in all Phase 2-3b studies and in recent years we’ve expanded this work globally into Phases 1-4, as well as health outcomes and real-world evidence studies. Patient insights have led to significant changes in how we conduct our clinical trials, for example:

  • Raising age thresholds for studies to include those ageing with HIV.
  • Building extra support for women into study designs, such as childcare or travel assistance.
  • Conducting trials for specific subpopulations, like Black women living in the Southern US, who have unique unmet needs.

In 2025 feedback from our Global Patient Summit further reinforced our strategy around early patient involvement in R&D is the right one. Moving forward, our Global Community Advisory Panel – a group of 23 diverse patient advisors – will continue to be instrumental, evolving into three working groups focused on research, health literacy and advocacy and policy.

How is ViiV working to accelerate access to HIV medicines and care?

We know that HIV innovation only really matters if we can get it into the hands of those that need it most. But we can’t do it alone. That’s why our partnerships with patient and community groups and healthcare organisations are so important. We often think of our partnerships as spanning three key areas:

1/ Access to medicines

“Our commitment to increase access to both our established medicines and our

latest innovations for those most impacted by HIV, no matter who they are or where

they live, remains a key pillar of our strategy. We do this through partnerships,

flexible and sustainable pricing approaches, collaborating across healthcare infrastructure and

voluntary licensing agreements with organisations like the Medicines Patent Pool.”

Over the past 10 years our voluntary licences with organisations like the Medicines Patent Pool (MPP) have enabled generic manufacturers to develop and sell low-cost versions of our medicines in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) where the burden of HIV is highest.

Our longest-standing voluntary licences cover single- or fixed-dose combination products containing generic dolutegravir for HIV treatment, and through our partnerships over 1.75 billion packs have been supplied. By the end of 2025 more than 26 million people across 129 countries had access to a generic product containing dolutegravir – that’s at least 90% of people living with HIV on antiretrovirals in generic-accessible LMICs.

Although children only account for 3% of people living with HIV, they made up 12% of AIDS-related deaths in 2024. We work with partners to get age-appropriate HIV treatment options into the hands of those who need them. For example, following FDA approval of dispersible dolutegravir we saw a rapid paediatric rollout and paediatric formulations are now available in 123 countries.

We believe long-acting injectables are the key to ending the HIV epidemic. That’s why, since 2022, we’ve focused on increasing access to our long-acting injectable cabotegravir for HIV prevention (CAB LA for PrEP) and in 2025 we expanded our voluntary licence with the MPP to include long-acting cabotegravir for HIV treatment (when used in combination with J&J’s rilpivirine) in 133 countries.

For assets currently in our pipeline, access considerations begin in early development – usually from Phase 2 – when we start to evaluate key challenges and opportunities for a product’s emerging clinical profile. This approach helps us to evaluate potential impact in LMICs taking into consideration healthcare system needs and infrastructure so we can tailor our access strategies accordingly. We will continue to collaborate and advocate to inform national, regional and global public policies which promote equitable access to HIV medicines and care.

2/ Strengthening healthcare systems and creating healthier communities

“At ViiV, we know that stronger partnerships and deep collaboration with the

community lead to more meaningful, impactful and sustainable solutions.”

Rooted in putting people at the centre of the HIV response, Positive Action – ViiV’s long-running grant-giving programme – enables partners to amplify the voices of those most impacted by HIV, recognising that locally driven solutions, grounded in lived experience, are essential to accelerate progress towards ending the HIV epidemic.

In 2025, Positive Action invested more than £37 million, reaching approximately 721,000 people and providing 450 grants across 44 countries. Going forward, our partnerships will focus on further strengthening community health systems and closing critical gaps in paediatric and adolescent HIV, while continuing to address HIV-related stigma and discrimination.

3/ Community engagement, outreach and education

“Through actively engaging patient communities and partnering with local

organisations, we’re working to address barriers to care, shatter stigma and

ensure that our initiatives are culturally relevant and impactful.”

At ViiV, we never underestimate the power of bringing the community together to co-create sustainable solutions to drive progress. In 2025, we built on the success of our long-standing US Youth and Community Summit by bringing together HIV community members from around the world for our first ever Global Patient Summit where we explored collaborative initiatives to help end the HIV and AIDS epidemic. The outcomes of this, plus other community events throughout the year, help guide our patient engagement focus areas for the year ahead.

To help people make more informed choices about their HIV care, we co-create educational campaigns and tools with the community focused on the topics most important to them. These include initiatives like ‘Risk to Reasons‘ that reframe HIV conversations for women, moving beyond stigma to informed prevention choices and ‘THRIVE’ that normalises living with HIV and enhances treatment literacy. The THRIVE programme will soon expand to include women, migrants, and older populations as well as our original audience of men who have sex with men (MSMs).

In the US, we have a brilliant field-based team of External Affairs Community Liaisons (EACL) who are dedicated to gathering community insights, strengthening local networks, and connecting people to resources, particularly Black men and women, people of trans experience, and Latino communities. Unlike traditional industry liaison models, the EACL team does not engage in product discussions and is solely dedicated to supporting community partners’ reach, trust building, and engagement efforts for individuals who are not currently accessing HIV prevention or care.

We also know how important it is for healthcare providers, policymakers and HCPs to truly understand lived experience to improve health outcomes for those living with HIV. Since 2016, we’ve been working with community representatives from around the world to undertake ‘Positive Perspectives’ – a three-part global, cross-sectional survey of people living with HIV. Results from the first two waves have been published broadly and we’re now conducting the third wave, aiming to collect responses from 3,000 people, representing 29 countries. As with each wave, this too has been co-created to ensure the research, its interpretation and dissemination is relevant, accessible and useful to communities and key stakeholders in healthcare.

And finally, what are the mutual gains of long-term partnerships between industry and patient groups?

“With the number of people living with HIV rising each year, meaningful

collaboration between those impacted by HIV and the pharma industry has never

been more vital. It’s only by working in lockstep together we can ever hope to

achieve our combined ambition – to make HIV history.”

Long-term relationships with patient groups and the HIV community are fundamental to our work both now and in the future. For ViiV, these partnerships lead to more impactful innovation and medicines that better address community needs, insight-led decision making that shapes product design, support and access strategies and enhanced trust and reputation with those that we serve.

For our patient groups, these partnerships mean not only medicines and solutions that truly meet patient needs (and evolve when needs change) but also more time for strategic planning, more consistent access to resources and united progress towards shared objectives.

But don’t take my word for it. Here’s what just a few of our partners said about us and the power of partnership between industry and patient groups:

Dr Keith Green, Chicago Black Gay Men’s Caucus – “What sets ViiV apart is they get to the heart of the work – removing barriers so we can take action and create space for community building.”

Midnight Poonkasetwattana, APCOM – “We need meaningful collaboration with industry to ensure key populations can access innovative interventions.”

Yvette Raphael, Advocates for the Prevention of HIV in Africa / African Women HIV Prevention Community Accountability Board – “By ensuring work is rooted in the real experience of HIV communities, we can increase choice and transform lives.”

Krista Martel, The Well Project – “We’re proud to be a long-time partner of ViiV who share our commitment to optimising health outcomes for women impacted by HIV.”

Explore more company perspectives on their patient-group relations

For additional insights into pharma-patient-group relations, the ‘What Companies Say, 2025-2026’ results are available. In this stand-alone document, companies share their latest achievements, with a special focus on engaging patients in R&D. The participating companies are: Boehringer Ingelheim, Novartis, Servier and ViiV Healthcare.

Learn more about What Companies Say: https://www.patient-view.com/what-companies-say-survey/