Abstractions

摘要

Twenty-eight years after AIDS was first recognized, preventing the transmission of HIV remains an elusive goal. Clinical trials of strategies aimed at preventing transmission to women, including virus-inhibiting compounds called microbicides, have been disappointing. On page 1034, microbiologist Ashley Haase at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and his colleagues show that microbicides may yet prove beneficial. While investigating the earliest stages of simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) infection in rhesus macaques, the team revealed how this HIV-like virus exploits the host's normal immune response in order to fuel systemic spread. This led them to test a seemingly unorthodox strategy - blocking the host's immune response with microbicides to deprive the virus of the cells it uses to spread. Haase tells Nature more.