Twenty years after the discovery of Aids, no preventative vaccine has ever been successfully developed. The drug therapy that dominates the market has been the same for more than a decade. But at the cutting edge of research into the HIV virus is an innovative new form of gene therapy that hopes to use the HIV virus to turn on itself.

“You can take HIV, mess around with it, make it less pathogenic and put a DNA payload into it,” says David Brooks, business development manager at Medical Marketing International, a pharmaceutical development company.