"Steady progress" - just to make someone not familiar with the pharma industry gets this correctly : this means only the safety part of the drug has been proven, but there is no efficacy proof so far, so technically speaking we are very far away from a commercial vaccine. Probably 5-7 years more work ahead, assuming nothing goes wrong. And efficacy may not be a binary scenario, depending on the virus strains, since HIV is known to mutate a lot. Don't hold your breath, even if this is encouraging.
Whatever happened to that drug that just killed all cells infected by a virus? That sounded like a promising cure for everything from HIV to the common cold..<p><a href="http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/antiviral-0810.html" rel="nofollow">http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/antiviral-0810.html</a> - this one!
I remember reading the same headline in the 90s. That the headline reads still the same 15 years later, tells us how little progress we made on this side.