Dr. Julio Montaner: Vancouver AIDS researcher takes a global perspective

published on December 29, 2015 by Matthew Robinson, in The Vancouver Sun

B.C. has made great strides suppressing the disease but the job is not finished, he says

When Dr. Julio Montaner came to Vancouver in the 1980s, HIV was a death sentence for those who contracted it and AIDS was becoming a devastating global disease.

But it was respiratory disease that interested the young doctor and it took some clever coaxing to turn Montaner’s focus to HIV.

Three decades of pioneering work later, Montaner and those he has worked with along the way have given the world a very real shot at ending the AIDS pandemic by 2030.

There is not enough room on this page to list Montaner’s many positions, but he a professor of medicine at the University of B.C. and the head of its AIDS division, for starters. Montaner won a prestigious Royal Society of Canada award this year for sustained excellence in medical science.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

Q: Describe the situation in B.C. when you arrived.

A: HIV took off in Canada in the mid-’80s, and particularly in B.C. It was the worst-affected jurisdiction on a per capita basis. At the time it was a big challenge, but in retrospect it was the best thing that ever happened to us because it forced our hand to consolidate our efforts.

Q: What was your first breakthrough?

A: The first eureka moment was when we came across data that showed triple therapy — highly active retroviral therapy — inhibited the ability to grow HIV. That was in December 1995. At the time, to be honest with you, we didn’t fully understand the implications of this. We didn’t know what it meant. The senior biologist that was working with us said, “Do you think this is a mistake? Have we messed up the samples?” We suspected this was huge, but we didn’t know how huge it was.

Q: Where did that discovery lead?

A: Triple therapy became the standard of care. It was challenging because the drugs were not quite there yet, but it really totally changed the management of HIV. From one day to the next, HIV became a readily treatable disease. Before 1996, there was at least a death a day in B.C. from AIDS. That dropped to around 100 a year.

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Dr. Julio Montaner: Vancouver AIDS researcher takes a global perspective

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