“With regards to emerging HIV research, all bets are off,” Jenna* told me over the phone last week. As the director of a multimillion dollar AIDS charity, she should know. “Five years ago, if you would have said that a man could be cured of HIV through an experimental stem cell transplant, and that treatment as prevention would be one of the hottest topics in the field, no one would have believed you.”
The scores of university-based scientists creating novel approaches to eliminate HIV are suddenly more attractive after a previously unknown doctor in Berlin cured Timothy Brown of AIDS through a novel bone marrow transplant. What could other nontraditional approaches do for our ability to fight AIDS? What will the next great leap forward be, and how can we make sure it gets tested ASAP?