A New Tack for HIV Vaccines, and Why This Problem Is So Hard to Solve
Rhesus Macaque Wikimedia Commons Attempts to create a vaccine for HIV have failed time and again partly because no one has been able to achieve the right vaccine balance - one that can spur the body into action, but not make a person sick. A new study in monkeys suggests a new solution: Vaccines could be more effective if they can be made to linger in the body. Most vaccines work by introducing the body to a virus so it can build up defenses to fight off the invader. This works in one of two ways: Either the vaccines introduce a live, but modified, version of a virus - like the nasal-spray flu vaccine - or they introduce an inactivated version, which can still be enough to turn on the immune system. In the early 1990s, researchers saw some promise with a slightly weakened version of simian immunodeficiency virus, the monkey...