"After twenty-three years of intense research into the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), together with the accumulated experience of more than twenty million deaths from the infection worldwide, there is still no prospect of a vaccine to prevent AIDS. Is the discovery of a vaccine simply a matter of time? Or has this virus presented scientists with a hitherto underestimated, perhaps even impossible, challenge?"

-- Richard Horton, 2004

"With AIDS, there are individuals who seem to be able to resist HIV-1 infection in settings in which they normally would be expected to contract the disease. There are also "slow progressors" who have contracted HIV-1, but who have shown no symptoms of the disease, even after many years. However there is no documented case of someone who has had a full-blown HIV-1 infection and whose immune system has fought off and destroyed the virus. In fact, because no one seems to have survived a "natural" HIV-1 infection, there is the underlying fear that vaccination against the AIDS virus may not be possible: the human immune system simply may not be capable of mounting a successful defense against this particular virus. However, the hope remains that some clever immunologist will come up with a vaccine that can prepare the immune system to resist an HIV-1 attack-perhaps in ways that exposure to the virus itself cannot do."

-- Lauren Sompayrac in "How Pathogenic Viruses Work"

We are probably not going to cure HIV/AIDS anytime in the near future. And, despite the effort of thousands of the world's brightest minds, working for about 25 years, we have not yet found the desperately needed HIV vaccine. There are several vaccine "paradigms" that have worked for creating viral vaccines in the past, but it is becoming painfully clear that none of these are going to work for HIV. The well is dry. When I was a post-doc, one of the foremost HIV vaccine investigators told me that he thought that the answer was going to have to come from Basic Science. That is, we are going to have to go back the beginning, to think outside the box, and to create new ideas for attacking this disease.

In the Sawyer lab, we are trying to contribute to this cause. Our investigation into the evolution of immunity genes has led us to mechanistic insights and has given us an acute understanding of why human genes are so poor in head-on-head combat with HIV. Our research into the process of retroviral integration will help us understand the deadly HIV "reservoir" that makes this viral infection incurable.