AIDS vaccine candidate completely clears virus from body in monkeys

Researchers are continuing to search for a HIV/AIDS vaccine that could potentially solve the AIDS epidemic. Now, they may be one step closer, Scientists have announced that they’ve developed a HIV/AIDS vaccine candidate that appears to have the ability to completely clear an AIDS-causing virus from the body. “To date, HIV infection has only been cured in a very small number of highly-publicized but unusual clinical cases in which HIV-infected individuals were treated with anti-viral medicines very early after the onset of infection or received a stem cell transplant to combat cancer,” said Louis Picker, one of the researchers, in a news release. “This latest research suggests that certain immune responses elicited by a new vaccine may also have the ability to completely remove HIV from the body.” In order to develop this vaccine, the researchers used cytomegalovirus, or CMV. This common virus is already carried by a large percentage of the...