Comment Promising, but... (Score 4, Interesting) 190
This experiment will probably not produce an actual human drug, as it suffers from the same drawback as most previous gene-therapy studies: the Adenovirus transduction system will kill a significant number of patients.
However, the results do seem to indicate that a monoclonal antibody has protective effects. The gene therapy vaccine may not work, but you could inject purified antibody into someone who had a known exposure, or is going to be in a high-risk situation, and prevent infection. Unfortunately, these types of therapies will never be able to cure an established infection, as HIV integrates its genome into host T-cells.