While many researchers say an AIDS vaccine is distant - and some declare the prospect unrealistic - Pathology and Laboratory Medicine professor Carl June is pioneering a new gene therapy that could convert the HIV virus in a patient’s body into a less harmful form.

While patients already can take “cocktails” of anti-retroviral drugs to manage the AIDS disease, such treatments are costly, ridden with unpleasant side-effects and ineffective in preventing the patient from passing on the virus.

June said he believes these downsides will be overcome by his treatment: a carrier of therapeutic genes that can be inserted into cells to bolster their immune response - possibly by weakening HIV when it attacks those cells.

Ideally, HIV victims treated with June’s therapy would only be able to pass on a less virulent form of the virus, resulting in an overall “vaccine effect.”

Laboratory and small clinical tests over the past five years have shown that this therapy suppresses HIV from spreading within the body.