This is what synthetic biology can do. Instead of taking on challenging chemistry routes to produce ever more exotic small molecules [1] which we then bathe an entire organism in, in the hopes it rubs against the HIV proteins in a way that disrupts them, synthetic biology intelligently repurposes the machinery already in place in one's body to accomplish a slightly different task. This is a primitive, if seemingly effective example.
Here, a decoy was created. It's the same set or proteins that HIV binds to in order to gain access to human cells. But the proteins are only tiny chunks from the original and are floating around on their own rather than acting as the keys to the cell. Not all that different from redirecting a heat seeking missile with a bunch of flares. But because the 'flares' are actually identical (in part) to the real proteins in a human, were HIV to mutate away from being able to bind to those chunks it too would become less virulent when attacking the real proteins. And if the strategy is effective, it takes less than a week of labwork to design and produce another similar tactic - very much unlike the small molecule variety.
Here, a decoy was created. It's the same set or proteins that HIV binds to in order to gain access to human cells. But the proteins are only tiny chunks from the original and are floating around on their own rather than acting as the keys to the cell. Not all that different from redirecting a heat seeking missile with a bunch of flares. But because the 'flares' are actually identical (in part) to the real proteins in a human, were HIV to mutate away from being able to bind to those chunks it too would become less virulent when attacking the real proteins. And if the strategy is effective, it takes less than a week of labwork to design and produce another similar tactic - very much unlike the small molecule variety.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenofovir