Word: hiv
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...certainly got the message. For nearly a quarter of a century, he and other AIDS scientists had been whiffing repeatedly, failing to make contact as HIV stymied them again and again. Powerful drugs to foil HIV could do only so much. To corral the epidemic and truly prevent HIV, only a vaccine would do. The problem was that no vaccine strategy had ever succeeded in blocking the virus from infecting new hosts, and that wasn't likely to change in the near future. "It struck a special chord with me," says Ho of the baseball image. "I think it accurately...
Since that meeting, much has changed, but the fundamental problem of developing an effective AIDS vaccine remains. On the positive side, in 2009, scientists announced that they had developed the first vaccine to show any effect against HIV infection - although that effect is, by all measures, modest. The vaccine's ability to reduce the risk of new HIV infection 31% is nowhere near the 70% to 90% that public-health experts normally view as a minimum threshold for an infectious-disease vaccine. Even further behind in development, but still promising, are two new antibodies identified by a group of researchers...
...after a highly anticipated shot against the virus was deemed a failure. While nobody expected spectacular results, neither did anyone expect such a stunning defeat, and the scientific community is still struggling to recover from it. "We are still a long ways away from having an effective HIV vaccine that physicians can reach into the cabinet and pull out in a vial and inject into a person," says Dr. Bruce Walker, an HIV expert at Harvard Medical School. (See the top 10 scientific discoveries...
That may be true, but Ho, who has been working to develop an HIV vaccine of his own, now believes that a traditional shot, one that relies on snippets of a virus to both awaken and prod the immune system to churn out antibodies, may not be the best way to fight HIV. Rather than expecting the body to do all the work of first recognizing then mounting an attack against the virus, why not just present the body with a ready-made arsenal of antibodies that can home in on HIV? It's the immunological equivalent of a frozen...
...preoccupation with HIV only grew as the virus continued to baffle scientists. Expecting the unexpected was the best way to confront HIV, he soon learned, and he quickly amassed an impressive array of scientific firsts in the field. As director of ADARC, which was founded in 1991 and was one of the first research centers dedicated solely to the study of AIDS, he led a team that pioneered the "hit 'em early and hit 'em hard" approach to drug therapy, now the core of the ARV-cocktail treatment that is keeping millions of HIV-positive patients alive. His lab showed...