GWEN IFILL: For all of the progress made in the fight against AIDS, it still takes a terrible toll. More than 35 million people are infected with HIV around the world. More than two million people are newly infected each year. And well over a million die from it annually.

But research released at an AIDS conference this week is raising hope about new inroads into treating it and preventing infections.

Jeffrey Brown has the story.

JEFFREY BROWN: Three reports attracted attention. One involved injections of drugs into monkeys that helped stop infections. A second revealed promising news of a baby born with the virus and given aggressive treatment. A third concerned so-called gene editing, altering cells to resist HIV.

The NIHs Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has been funding much of this work. Dr. Anthony Fauci is its longtime director, and he joins me now.

And welcome back.

So, lets walk through some of this. First, the injections of long-lasting drugs into monkeys, explain the work and why its so important.

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI, National Institutes of Health: Well, the reason the reason the work is important is that we know, in human studies, several human studies, that if you give a drug to an uninfected person whos practicing risk behavior, we call it preexposure prophylaxis, that if they take the drug every day, it absolutely works and prevents infection in over 90 percent of the people.

The problem with the approach is that people dont like to take medicine every day or before or after a sexual encounter. So, a modality of prevention that you know works 90-plus percent doesnt work that well, purely because people dont adhere.

The experiments that have been reported recently now show that, in a monkey model, if you take a long-acting drug, a drug thats used in a different form to treat HIV infection, in a monkey model, and give an injection every so often, like every couple of months, you can actually prevent challenging that monkey with infection with the monkey version of HIV by exposing them rectally or vaginally.

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Injections, gene therapy and treatment for infants raise hope for fighting AIDS

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