New England Journal of Medicine
April 5, 2012  Vol. 366 No. 14
http://content.nejm.org/current.shtml

Editorials
The Road to an Effective HIV Vaccine
L.R. Baden and R. Dolin

Extract
During the 30 years since the discovery of HIV as the cause of AIDS, efforts to develop a vaccine have faced immense challenges. First, naturally acquired immunity to protect against infection that results in disease, found with virtually all other known infectious agents, may not exist for HIV. Second, the best available experimental animal model for AIDS, the nonhuman primate, provides potentially important information but also has substantial limitations. Therefore, advancement in the field has put an extraordinarily high premium on data from human studies. Yet only three candidate HIV vaccines have completed clinical efficacy trials. The first of these . . .