A new tactic attempts to herd the virus into an evolutionary dead end. Ed Yong follows it:
HIV out-evolves us. HIV can produce around 100 billion new virus particles every day, and it does so with unusual imprecision. When most genetic material is copied with great fidelity, HIV goes for a sloppier approach. It duplicates itself with errors galore, creating a swarm of genetically variable viruses. It leaves a host looking very different to when it entered. In the face of this rapid shape-shifting, any drug or vaccine soon becomes obsolete. Fighting HIV is like fighting a hydra – there are several heads and every time you lop one off, two more grow in its place.
To tackle this continually changing adversary, some scientists are looking for parts of HIV’s proteins that tend to stay the same. These “conserved sites” tend to be important in some way; mutating them would compromise the virus’s ability to reproduce. By training the immune system to attack these sites, we would give the virus an unenviable choice – do nothing and die, or change and become weaker.
The Dish 