Music is my drug.

that same someone now: trump is winning?? this is terrifying!

Hopes for a truly effective HIV vaccine were mostly the stuff of dreams in 2000, the last time Durban, South Africa, hosted the biennial meeting of the International AIDS Society. The global HIV Vaccine Trials Network, based at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and led by virologist and former Fred Hutch President and Director Dr. Larry Corey, was just being organized. No vaccine clinical trials were underway in South Africa, whose president at the time denied that HIV even caused AIDS. Sixteen years later, things have changed.

When Corey took the stage last week before fellow scientists, advocates, policymakers, and people living with HIV attending AIDS 2016, the world’s largest global health conference, his message was upbeat. “The HIV vaccine field,” he said, “is open for business.”

The HVTN, working with its sister network, the HIV Prevention Trials Network, or HPTN, based in Durham, North Carolina, has just begun what is already being called a landmark study to test an experimental, so-called broadly neutralizing antibody that could potentially protect people from infection by almost all strains of the rapidly mutating virus that causes AIDS. Called the AMP study, it will enroll 1,500 sexually active women at 15 sites in southern Africa. A parallel study will enroll 2,700 men and transgender people who have sex with men at 24 sites in the U.S. and South America.

The HVTN will roll out a second large-scale trial in South Africa in November with 5,400 HIV-negative men and women, the first such trial to be in the field in a decade and one that could lead to the first licensed vaccine against HIV.

And on Wednesday, Corey said that the HVTN could add a third clinical trial of a vaccine being developed by Janssen, a research division of Johnson & Johnson, in partnership with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center/Harvard Medical School, the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Ragon Institute of Massachusetts General Hospital and the U.S. Military HIV Research Program. Initial results of a smaller trial will be available later this year, and “If they look good, a [large-scale] trial will be undertaken,” Corey said.

The three trials would represent three distinct approaches to an HIV vaccine — a testament to how challenging it has been to develop a vaccine against a virus that mutates so rapidly even within a single person that antibodies can’t keep up with the changes and against which no one has ever developed a natural immunity.

Missed the point.