The symposium IAS Towards an HIV Cure was held in Melbourne, Australia, in July 2014. There are several challenges regarding an HIV cure, among these the reservoir of latently infected CD4+ T cells which are hidden from the immune system. A new promising approach towards an HIV cure is the "shock and kill" strategy. Here, the latently infected cells are shocked to express HIV on the surface, and afterwards the shocked cells can be eradicated by apoptosis or destruction by the immune system. In this paper the most important results from the symposium are presented.