Some good news!

FROM SCIENCE DAILY: AIDS Vaccine Gets Closer: Targeting Virus' Achilles Heel. As you may know, the HIV virus, like its distant cousins, the herpes and chicken-pox viruses, is a retrovirus, which makes it more difficult to contend with.

Well, they just may have found the chink in the HIV armour:

With the support of the National Institutes of Health, the Arnolds and their team have been able to take a piece of HIV that is involved with helping the virus enter cells, put it on the surface of a common cold virus, and then immunize animals with it. They found that the animals made antibodies that can stop an unusually diverse set of HIV isolates or varieties.

The approach taken by the Arnolds and their colleagues has been to identify a part of the AIDS virus that is crucial to its viability – something the virus needs in order to complete its life cycle – and then target this Achilles heel.

Human rhinovirus showing pieces of HIV (red) that stimulate helpful immune responses displayed on the rhinovirus surface, thereby creating a safe mimic of HIV. (Credit: Gail Ferstandig Arnold)