Created in partnership with and funded by ViiV Healthcare.
Nearly 60 years after she first fell in love with science, Marty St. Clair is preparing to retire after half a century at the same lab. This comes at a remarkable inflection point in HIV treatment and prevention—one she spent her career building. It is the culmination of her relentless work that has helped turn HIV from a death sentence into a manageable condition.
We’re working to end HIV, thanks to brilliant minds that break through barriers, driving innovations and progress that are transforming the lives of people affected by the virus. These are The Unstoppables, and Marty St. Clair is proud to be among them.
Recently, her focus has been on long-acting options—treatment and prevention tools that have longer dosing intervals, offering the promise of helping to liberate people living with HIV from stigma, improving quality of life, and the ability to offer choice and reduce the psychological demands of oral therapy. Something that St. Clair finds exciting is that she hopes they may allow people to not only control the virus but also to have options which might work best with their lifestyle.
“I don’t think we had a clue that we would be where we are today when I started out,” she says.
A lifelong calling to innovate: How a virus sparked a revolution in medicine
It began in 1968, when a 13-year-old girl in a biology class saw a close-up photo of a T7 bacteriophage, a bacteria-attacking virus, that looked almost exactly like a tiny lunar lander. Most people would see it as a fun, weird science fact; to Marty St. Clair, it was a calling.
“What other 13-year-old girl fascinated by science would think anything other than ‘this is what I want to do for the rest of my life’?” she says, laughing.
St. Clair’s path to becoming one of these pioneers wasn’t always linear. In 1976, she joined Burroughs Wellcome, a small North Carolina-based pharmaceutical firm that would eventually become part of ViiV Healthcare. There she found herself under the wing of the legendary Gertrude “Trudy” Elion, who would later win a Nobel Prize for work in drug design. The bar was high, and the expectations were simple: keep pushing.
By 1984, HIV had become a global crisis, and the scientific consensus was grim. Most researchers believed that any drug capable of blocking the virus would also destroy the very cells it was trying to protect. “The entire rest of the world did not think what we did was possible,” St. Clair says. “But we never doubted. We were cocky. We had been successful with other antiviral medicines, and we just thought we were unstoppable.”
Making history: Identifying the first antiretroviral medication for HIV
Working in a lab with a team of around 400 people, St. Clair developed the method used to test thousands of potential compounds. In November 1984, that work led to the identification of the first antiretroviral medication. With people dying by the thousands, the standard decade-long drug development timeline wasn’t an option.
The data was so compelling that the FDA approved the antiretroviral medication to treat HIV and AIDS based on Phase II clinical trials rather than the standard Phase III. The entire process took just 25 months. It remains one of the fastest drug approvals in FDA history—and for the hundreds of thousands of people who needed it, the timing was everything.
“Between 1987 and 1995, people with HIV essentially had one treatment choice,” she says. “If it weren’t for us, they wouldn’t have had any.”
St. Clair is quick to admit that the antiretroviral wasn’t a cure. It was toxic at high doses, and the virus quickly developed resistance. That sent researchers toward the next big insight: to actually beat HIV back, you had to hit it from multiple angles at once.
St. Clair was determined. She helped develop more antiretrovirals and eventually the first “all-in-one” pills. But the development she credits as the real turning point was integrase inhibitors—a class of drug known for their efficacy, safety and high barrier to resistance, that targets a key enzyme HIV uses to replicate and spread.
Educating the next generation of scientists
That work paved the way for the next generation of innovative long-acting solutions she is leaving behind today.
Outside the lab, St. Clair raises llamas and miniature donkeys on a farm in North Carolina.”You can’t take the farm out of the girl,” she says.
In retirement, St. Clair doesn’t plan to stop and will keep educating the next generation of scientists. HIV has been dropping out of sex education curricula without much notice, and she thinks that’s a big problem. “People think we’ve got it figured out, so we don’t need to teach kids about it anymore,” she says.
It’s an understandable assumption. Science has made huge leaps in making HIV a manageable chronic condition, and prevention now requires little more than a simple dosing regimen every few months. Not bad for a girl who fell in love with a virus that looks like a spaceship.
Discover more stories from The Unstoppables and learn about how innovation has shaped progress in HIV, or visit ViiV Healthcare to explore their commitment to ending the HIV epidemic.
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