Just four days after World AIDS Day comes news of a potential break through in HIV/AIDS research, as found on Queerty.

Ars Technica reported that:

 a team of labs at Caltech and UCLA decided to short-circuit the need for a vaccination, or even antibody-producing immune cells. They created a disarmed adenovirus that contained the genes needed to produce a broadly effective antibody from humans, optimizing the DNA to make sure that the antibody was made in muscle cells, and then secreted into their environment.

The modified virus was then injected into mice that had had their immune systems humanized (the stem cells in their bone marrow were killed off and then repopulated with human cells). The mice were then exposed to levels of HIV many times higher than are normally present during initial infections. Not all antibodies effectively blocked new infections, but at least one did so consistently. The resistance to new HIV infections persisted for the life of the experiments.”

If these experiments conducted on the mice could be successfully carried over into human trials, there is hope that a single inoculation could one day prevent further HIV infections. This means we are steps closer to eradicating the virus for future generations.

I don’t know about you, but I find this hopeful. I would love for my daughter to mature into a world without the threat of infection from HIV.