Cure as process, not product: What Brazilian communities can teach HIV cure research.

Abstract

Biomedical HIV cure research has largely defined cure through virological endpoints, often overlooking how communities understand, imagine, and produce knowledge about it. Drawing on Brazilian histories of HIV activism, community engagement, and artistic practice, and on the author's situated experience as a community educator in cure research, this commentary argues that communities should be recognised not merely as participants but as knowledge producers who shape research questions, priorities, and definitions of success. It situates this argument within the fragmented HIV cure research landscape of Latin America and the Caribbean. Experience with community engagement through the HOPE Collaboratory illustrates how sustained relationships contribute to knowledge production. The commentary also considers artistic practices by people living with HIV as forms of enquiry and technologies of healing through which stigma, structural violence, and collective memory can be named, contested, and reworked. Distinguishing biomedical cure from healing, it presents cure as a process whose meaning is shaped before, during, and after biomedical intervention. A meaningful and equitable cure depends not only on what happens to the virus, but also on whose knowledge informs research, how risks and benefits are distributed, who can access interventions, and what futures communities can imagine.