August 2006 saw the final days of the sixteenth International AIDS conference in Toronto overshadowed by the protests of a large group of South African HIV-positive delegates who sought asylum in Canada, claiming they faced severe discrimination in their home country. It is now 25 years since the first AIDS cases were reported in the United States but, as these events testify, people living with HIV infection in the developing world still face unacceptable hardships.
Although HAART (highly active anti-retroviral therapy) has revolutionized the treatment of HIV infection, only one in five people in low and middle-income countries have access to these therapies, and so preventative treatments for HIV remain the ideal solution and an effective vaccine the ultimate goal. This month, Amalio Telenti and David Goldstein share their vision of how scientists can harness genomics techniques in the search for a vaccine against HIV (page 865). They focus not on the virus, but on the host genome, explaining how recent advances in our knowledge of human genetic variation — exemplified by data gleaned from the HapMap project — can be used to identify genes that influence the immune response to HIV.
