In 2006, 25 years after AIDS made its first appearance in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, an estimated 2.9 million people died of the illness. That same year, more than 4 million people were infected with HIV, joining the 35.2 million living with HIV/AIDS. Despite the dozens of approved treatments for the disease, resistance and side effects are never far behind, and millions of people need new therapies to help them live with HIV/AIDS, not die from it. On the next several pages, you'll find five approaches that researchers say could do just that, or even prevent the disease entirely.
One, the first oral treatment that prevents the virus from entering uninfected host cells (see "The best offense?"), got a stamp of approval from the FDA last month: The agency approved the first CCR5 inhibitor, Pfizer's maraviroc, on August 6. In June, a European Medicines ...
