Formative work to develop differentiated communication tools to facilitate transgender women's recruitment, enrollment, and retention in HIV vaccine trials

ABSTRACT In the United States (US), HIV prevalence among transgender women (TW) is high (~14%). Yet, uptake of HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) among TW is low (5-20% of US TW report ever using PrEP) and adherence is often poor. This is in large part because TW were poorly represented in PrEP trials, leading to data quality issues, and gaps in knowledge about TW's experiences with PrEP. Our previous studies and other literature found that TW are unwilling to use biomedical HIV prevention strategies unless they have been tested for safety, tolerability, and efficacy with TW. HIV vaccines are a promising alternative or companion to PrEP, since vaccines would not require long-term, near-perfect adherence to a daily or bi-monthly product. However, it is currently impossible to evaluate HIV vaccine candidates for safety, tolerability, and efficacy among TW, since TW represent