Simply irresistible

Preventing HIV from mutating and developing resistance to treatment has been a nearly intractable problem. Two papers by different Boston-area research teams describe advances toward the common goal of solving it: one group is going so far as to begin preparing a nanotechnology platform for a candidate HIV vaccine, and the other team has identified scores of new intracellular proteins as potential targets.

Drug companies think both approaches need more translational work before they are ready to enter the drug development path. However, they also think the vaccine group's target-membrane-proximal ectodomain region (MPER)-is worth pursuing, and that the screening method used by the other group could have utility in finding the host genes involved in activating latent virus that has been integrated into cells...