“…The importance of cellular immunity in the control of HIV infection and the poor effectiveness of neutralizing antibodies to this pathogen form a formidable challenge for the development of protective HIV vaccines (17,65). Live attenuated vaccine candidates provide much better protection than protein-based or nucleic acidbased vaccines (4,47,53,87,101), and immunogens based upon the more aggressive X4 viruses (5,12,82,86) seem to protect somewhat better than those based on the more natural R5 viruses (2,44,73) that provide hardly any protection (65). Attenuated HIV is too dangerous to be used for vaccination in humans (43), and we investigate here why other vaccination approaches fail to provide sterilizing immunity.…”