Check out this coverage of an anti-HIV clinical trial in SFGate.

This article is really neat. The researchers purify out hematopoietic stem cells from patients, transduce them with a mouse (lenti?)virus containing a ribozyme designed to destroy one of the HIV transcripts, and reinfuse them into patients.

Apparently they have a few patients now living off medications with undetectable levels of virus.

Very impressive, especially considering that this is using a single-ribozyme. Ribozymes, by the way, are kind of out. They're hard to design, don't always work, etc. Imagine what you could do these days with siRNA and miRNA. At the same time you knock out viral transcripts you could target the receptors that HIV uses to gain access to cells. And since hematopoietic stem cells will eventually replace all of your blood cells, from white cells to RBCs, you'll eventually have an HIV-resistant blood supply coursing through the old veins.

If they got this level of success from a single ribozyme, this looks like great potential for a future cure. Let's just hope that damn lentivirus doesn't cause leukemia like in that SIDS trial.