HIV-infected individuals with access to modern antiretroviral regimens should be able to suppress viral replication for life, preserve immune function, and avoid most AIDS-related complications • Antiretroviral therapy does not fully restore health in all individuals; well treated HIV-infected adults have higher than expected risk of several non-AIDS disorders, including cardiovascular disease, kidney disease, liver disease, malignancy, and some neurological diseases • Although antiretroviral therapy often restores peripheral CD4+ T-cell counts, persistent immune dysfunction, infl ammation, and coagulation abnormalities persist and strongly predict risk of non-AIDS morbidity and mortality • The growing burden of comorbidities in ageing adults will require well resourced health-care delivery systems for chronic care, which are staff ed by experts in both infectious and non-infectious complications • Because antiretroviral therapy must be taken for life, at considerable cost and commitment from the individual, interest is growing in identifi cation of strategies to achieve a functional or sterilising cure • A few successful reports of functional cure in unique populations (eg, patients with acute infection or bone-marrow transplant recipients) have been reported, but progress to develop a curative intervention that is applicable to most of the infected population has been slow, and a scalable cure is not expected to be available for many years to decades