Jennifer Matthews: Ron knows the routine by heart. Five pills every day. After 20 years, he's learned to live with AIDS.
Ron: It's how you take care of yourself when you get this disease, how you react to the disease, how you decide that you want to live.
Jennifer Matthews: The drugs that make living with AIDS possible come with a catch. Not every drug combination works for every patient. Researchers at Duke University have developed a critical test that provides an early warning of which medicines a patient will be resistant to.
Charles Hicks: Our goal of therapy is to be so potent that the virus cannot continue to grow.
Jennifer Matthews: At the University of Florida, researchers are taking a different approach. Studying blood samples from young HIV patients over several years, they tracked the virus's movements and genetic changes, every new color on this chart, another step on the path to full-blown AIDS. Clues that could one day tell them where and how to stop it.
Maureen M. Goodenow: Anything that's common that we can find in common, starts to give us a clue that we might have found something that could be universally targeted with a future drug development.
Jennifer Matthews: A development that could one day lead to a cure. For Ron, it can come soon enough.
Ron: I would love it. I think that's the life that I want. I wish I could hand in hand to go if --
Jennifer Matthews: This is Jennifer Matthews reporting.
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