Abstract
It has been more than 25 years since the discovery of HIV-1, the etiologic agent of AIDS. Despite a tremendous scientific effort worldwide, the pathogenesis of the disease has not been completely solved and an efficient vaccination strategy has not been developed yet.
Various vaccination approaches have been tried in nonhuman primate model of AIDS and several large vaccination studies have been conducted in human cohorts. However, the human vaccines failed to induce a reasonable protection and some of the more promising non-human primate vaccine approaches turned out to have serious safety issues.
This review aims to summarize our current knowledge of the pathogenesis of HIV-1 and lentivirus induced disease with a focus on the issues pertaining to the development of a succesful HIV vaccine.