In the absence of an effective vaccine, educational or interventional strategies that decrease sexual transmission of HIV hold the greatest promise for slowing infection rates. Although a safe and effective microbicide could greatly help in this regard, progress in this area has been disappointing with microbicide development often failing to take into account advances in our understanding of how HIV is transmitted and infects cells. In this issue, Hu et al. demonstrate that HIV infection of human cervical tissue ex vivo can be prevented not only by using antibodies that target the virus but by a cocktail of compounds that target the cell surface receptors to which the virus binds, thus providing a basis for the design of microbicides that prevent virus infection in a highly specific manner (1).
Potential microbicides for HIV can be placed into one of three categories: compounds that...
