eLife Assessment
In this useful study, the authors tested a novel approach to eradicating HIV reservoirs by constructing a herpes simplex virus (HSV)-based therapeutic vaccine and evaluating efficacy in experimental infections of chronically SIV-infected, antiretroviral therapy (ART)-treated macaques. While mean viremia at rebound was lower in the HSV vaccine-treated group, the evidence presented appears to be incomplete, as the group size was small and the viral load at rebound was highly variable. This is a revised paper, but the support for the conclusions, particularly the effect of the HSV-vectored therapeutic vaccine on the SIV reservoir in the SIV-infected macaques, remains limited.