NIH/NIAID Collaboration with Gates Foundation
Roadblock:
While antiretroviral drugs have been successful in expanding treatment to patients worldwide, current therapies do not clear the infection and so require life-long treatment to prevent the infection from progressing to more advanced forms of disease. The costs, scaling and maintenance of this treatment for the growing affected population are daunting. New methods need to be discovered that can permanently eliminate infection, even in cases where effects of the virus are being controlled with current drugs.