35 Innovators Receive $10,000 Each to Move Long-Acting HIV Delivery Concepts Toward Implementation

BETHESDA, Md., Sept. 29, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — The Office of AIDS Research (OAR) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), in partnership with HeroX, the leading platform and open marketplace for crowdsourced solutions, today announced the Phase 1 winners of the NIH ARISE-HIV LAUNCH Challenge. ARISE stands for Advancing Research in Implementation Science to End HIV. The challenge sought practical ways to deliver long-acting HIV prevention and treatment in real-world settings.

Approximately 1.2 million people in the U.S. are living with HIV, and about 1 in 8 don’t know it, underscoring the need for treatment delivery approaches that improve access, engagement, and sustained care. The NIH ARISE-HIV LAUNCH Challenge invited researchers and implementation scientists, public health practitioners, healthcare professionals, community-based organizations, advocates, and early-career academics to submit concept papers outlining promising approaches to long-acting HIV prevention and/or treatment delivery.

Submissions were evaluated on their potential to surface practical, community-informed ideas that could improve access, engagement, and implementation across HIV service delivery systems, without requiring a prototype, pilot program, or preliminary data.

You can find the full list of winning teams and their organizations here: https://www.herox.com/NIHARISE-HIVLAUNCH/379-meet-the-teams

Each Phase 1 winner will receive $10,000 and advance to Phase 2: Implementation Planning, where they will receive support to develop more detailed plans, including milestones, deliverables, outcome measures, and evaluation considerations.

“Congratulations to all 35 Phase 1 winners. What this group proves is that the best ideas about delivering HIV prevention and treatment are already out there,” said Jamie Elliott, Director of Customer Success at HeroX. “The solvers were varied, and many come from communities where these gaps are felt everyday. That’s where the most practical thinking about delivery tends to come from.”

Phase 1 winners were selected from more than 100 submissions from across the United States, reflecting broad geographic and programmatic diversity and strong interest from the HIV research and implementation community in reimagining how long-acting prevention and treatment reach the people who need them. Submitting organizations spanned academia, hospitals and clinical care sites, community-based organizations and nonprofits, for-profit companies, and individual or unaffiliated solvers, with submissions ranging from major metropolitan health systems to rural counties with elevated HIV incidence. Many concepts explicitly targeted rural communities and the Southern United States — regions that account for a disproportionate share of new HIV diagnoses and often fall outside dedicated federal metro funding.

Proposed delivery settings were similarly varied. Pharmacies and digital platforms or remote outreach models were the most common, followed closely by mobile units and street outreach, community-based organizations, hospitals and emergency departments, and Federally Qualified Health Centers. Others centered on correctional facilities, specialty HIV and infectious disease clinics, substance use treatment programs, and home-based or telehealth delivery; many combined several settings into a single model. Pharmacies played a meaningful role, whether as a primary administration site, a procurement or supply-chain partner, or a community access point.

To learn more about the NIH ARISE-HIV LAUNCH Challenge, visit https://www.herox.com/NIHARISE-HIVLAUNCH.

ABOUT

HeroX is the leading platform for crowdsourced innovation, connecting complex challenges with diverse problem-solvers worldwide. Explore the latest challenges at www.herox.com.

The NIH Office of AIDS Research is the coordinating and priority-setting office for the NIH HIV/AIDS research agenda, advancing research to end the HIV pandemic and improve health outcomes for people with HIV.

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