More than 20,000 scientists, activists and policymakers are gathering in Washington this weekend for the International AIDS Conference to discuss how to cut the spread of the AIDS virus.

While one of the main topics of discussion will be how to get more of the world's 34 million HIV-infected people on life-extending medications, at least one Canadian activist thinks we should be aiming even higher: a cure.

“It’s not enough to simply have drugs and to say that we have converted HIV for many people from a death sentence into a chronic, manageable disease,” Dr. Mark A. Wainberg, the director of the McGill University AIDS Centre at the Montreal Jewish General Hospital told CTV’s Canada AM.

What we need instead is to cure it altogether, he says.

The idea would have seemed absurd just a few years ago. But a lot has changed in a short period of time in the HIV/AIDS landscape.

Today’s antiviral medications mean that HIV-infected patients can now expect to live as long as others, as long as they can stay on the drugs for the rest of their lives.

The problem though, says Wainberg, is that vast swaths of the world’s AIDS patients cannot afford those drugs. It’s estimated that just 8 million of the 15 million treatment-eligible AIDS patients in poor regions of the world are getting the drugs.

“The expenses of providing those drugs to everyone around the world who would need them are just staggering,” Wainberg said from Washington. “So what we really need is a cure. And this conference is going to focus very intently on how we might try to achieve that.

“It’s no longer something we just want to dream about in a whimsical way; we actually want this to be accomplished.”

One avenue that offers hope for a cure is a man who’s been dubbed “the Berlin patient.”

Timothy Ray Brown, a 46-year-old American from Seattle, got a bone marrow transplant five years ago when he was living in Berlin and developed leukemia. His donor was immune to HIV by virtue of a genetic mutation that’s found in only 1 per cent of Caucasians.

Not only did the transplant cure Brown’s cancer, his HIV essentially disappeared. He hasn’t needed HIV medications ever again and is now considered the only man in the world ever cured of AIDS.

Wainberg says as exciting as that development is, Brown is likely an exception. Similar bone marrow transplants would be prohibitively expensive for 99 per cent of the world and wouldn’t even work for more than 90 per cent of HIV-infected people.

Nevertheless, Wainberg says, Brown’s case “provides a proof of principle that such a development is possible. It allows us to learn from this case.”

What scientists really need to figure out, he says, is how to make the current antiviral medications even better.

He explains that the HIV virus is able to hide out in reservoirs of what are called “latently infected cells” – meaning the cells are infected but they’re not actively producing more of the virus.

“One of the big issues is that these cells that are latently infected are not being killed off by the drugs that we use in therapy. So the hope is that we can find a way to somehow get these cells to somehow start producing the virus so that they are no longer hidden away from the immune system, and no longer hidden away from the antiviral drugs we use in therapy,” says Wainberg.

“And we’re hopeful that a combination approach is going to work and we’re going to have a cure.”

But in order to do that, he says, government need to offer up more research dollars. Wainberg hopes that Ottawa will get on board to help.

“There is a great deal of research taking place worldwide and we’re hopeful the Canadian government will also want to fund this kind of research in a much more compelling fashion than has been the case until recently.”