While there has been considerable progress against the spread of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, over the years, 1.3 million people acquired the virus in 2022, according to the World Health Organization. 

Pharmaceutical company ViiV Healthcare, which specializes in drugs to prevent or treat HIV and AIDS, created a campaign to educate the LGBTQ community about prevention options in partnership with drag legend RuPaul.

“We were really looking for an opportunity to create awareness and drive differentiation for [for ViiV] versus the other [pre-exposure prophylaxis] competitors that have been around for years,” said Jeff Fischer, EVP and head of content for Publicis Health Media, AOR for the campaign. “Given such a huge focus on the LGBTQ+ community, we felt RuPaul’s Drag Race was the perfect place for us to launch that kind of effort.”

Over the last two decades, the number of AIDS-related deaths has decreased significantly in part due to the development of antiretroviral drugs, which ViiV, among other companies, manufactures. But there were still 39 million people living with HIV in 2022, most of them in Africa, according to the WHO. 

RuPaul has featured a number of people with HIV on his reality series. 

ViiV launched the campaign by sponsoring a fashion show celebrating the premiere of season 16 of RuPaul’s Drag Race, which airs on MTV. The event took place on January 4 at Hammerstein Ballroom in New York. 

The brand also sponsored a reveal of the cast members and contestants; the debut of a new show, “Glam Slam;” a compilation of 10 memorable Drag Race performances; and a glossy book featuring photos from the fashion show that fans can win via social media during New York Fashion Week in February. 

The book is “part of a very large ecosystem that we have created,” said Fischer. It’s aimed at “super serving the audience — the Drag Race audience and our audience, which are ultimately one in the same. It’s doing it in a way that it shows up in all the places that [fans] might be searching out information about Drag Race.”

This article originally appeared on PRWeek US.